A lot has been said about how the outgoing US administration’s focus on censorship (“combating misinformation“); it negatively affected online speech and now a number of federal spending documents examined by a non-profit show the price of that effort – or at least a part of it.
A new report prepared by OpenTheBooks details the grants the Biden-Harris administration started giving out as it took over in early 2021, and this doesn’t include the taxpayer money spent internally, by various departments and agencies.
The grants figure comes to $267 million – a massive increase (44 times more) compared to the $6.7 million that Trump’s first administration set aside for the same purpose.
The grants went toward researching what the outgoing White House chose to consider misinformation, which in many cases resulted in third parties – organization, academia, etc., – promoting and/or censoring speech, opponents of the practice say, effectively (and unconstitutionally) – as government proxies.
Covid was one of the major topics covered by this type of “research” and here, the report notes, the approach was both to offer monetary incentives, and to pressure companies operating social networks in order to promote government narratives, but also shut down not only criticism, but even skepticism.
To make matters worse – many of these issues whose official explanation was treated as gospel, resulting in people getting deplatformed and demonetized if they questioned these interpretations, shortly after turned out to be anything but “misinformation” – such as the origin of the virus, the efficacy of mask-wearing, social distancing, the safety of vaccines, etc.
But, $127 million of US taxpayers’ money in total was used to enforce those narratives, through pro-vaccine advocacy, studies meant to stop “misinformation” on the internet, and the like.
One of the studies that received a government grant worth $200,000 ended up being used to go after then-former President Trump as one of the populist leaders around the world who were supposedly preventing “people coming together in solidarity.”
The report notes that this paper also promoted “experts” at the expense of allowing people to voice their opinions freely – regarding their own lives (in this case, affected by the pandemic measures).
