Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) Center for Free Speech has announced that it started the process of sending a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the first two addressed to the National Science Foundation (NSF).
In the US government structure, NSF is designated as “an independent federal government agency.” ADF now wants it to be transparent about activities and operations, specifically concerning any involvement in censorship.
The pro-free speech legal group explained that other requests will be sent to different federal agencies, all with the goal of shedding light on possible free speech, i.e., First Amendment violations.
The key information ADF wants to obtain through the two initial letters relates to NSF funding tools that may have been used while censoring Americans, and if and how NSF worked with groups involved in moderating online speech.
One of the FOIA requests seeks access to all communications between any NSF staff and anyone at Meta, Google, Snap, X (Twitter) Reddit, and Wikipedia, if those exchanges referenced “disinformation,” “hate speech,” “election integrity,” “lab leak,” “misinformation,” and a number of other terms (which would have come up in communications about censoring content.)
ADF also wants NSF (its Convergence Accelerator Section) to reveal relevant communications with a number of universities and a non-profit called Meedan, a “misinformation” flagger and “fact-checker” used in private messaging apps, that in 2021 received a $5.7 million grant from the federal agency.
The schools named in the requests that cover the period from 2018 until the first day of 2025 are the universities of Michigan and Wisconsin, and MIT.
The 2021 grant was supposed to fund Meedan’s work on countering “hate, abuse, and misinformation with minority-led partnerships.” That same year, Meedan was busy training Facebook’s “fact-checkers.”
Announcing the FOIAs, ADF Senior Counsel Phil Sechler accused the previous US administration of setting up “a censorship regime” instead of defending free speech and the First Amendment.
Noting that the term “misinformation” was used as justification to censor speech the Biden White House disliked, Sechler argues that US tax payers have a right to know if their money was used “to create censorship tools to suppress certain voices and how involved state actors were – and are – in social media and online censorship.”
ADF’s Center for Free Speech legal counsel Mathew Hoffmann told the Federalist that if the FOIA documents reveal that anyone’s rights have been violated through censorship, “litigation will certainly be an option.”
