Should the same federal government that improperly denied conservatives tax-exempt status and sought to investigate newsrooms now be tracking the Twitter hashtag #teaparty? Should it be the arbiter of what constitutes “misinformation” online or attempt to reduce “subversive propaganda”?
Well, the bureaucracy thinks the answer to all those questions should be yes–and it has already sunk $1 million in the effort.
This latest attempt by the federal bureaucracy to limit free speech comes courtesy of a powerful independent agency. Though not a household name, the National Science Foundation is a major source of funding for university researchers, accounting for about a quarter of all federally supported basic research conducted by America’s colleges and universities.
The research project seeks to “to detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution” in social media.
In fields such as mathematics, computer science and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of direct federal funding. Congress just raised its budget to $7.4 billion, with which it grants about 11,000 awards a year “to fund specific research proposals that have been judged the most promising by a rigorous and objective merit-review system,” according to the NSF’s own website.
We will let you be the judge, however, of whether Grant No. CCF-1101743, “Meme Diffusion Through Mass Social Media,” meets these high standards.
Nicknamed Truthy—tellingly, that’s a term borrowed from the liberal comedian Stephen Colbert—the research project seeks to “to detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution” in social media. According to the NSF, “this service could mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda, and assist in the preservation of open debate.”
Truthy also aims to track which Twitter accounts are using the #teaparty and #drudgereport hashtags, although also liberal ones such as #p2. Interestingly, the Truthy pages on tracking Drudge and #teaparty went dead within 48 hours of Federal Communications Commissioner Ajit Pai blowing the whistle on the NSF study in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post this past Saturday.
Worse yet, the NSF has handed the money to a team of Indiana University researchers who already claimed in a 2012 paper that conservatives enjoy a “a basic structural advantage with respect to the challenge of efficiently spreading political information on the Twitter platform” and that there is a “highly-active, densely-interconnected constituency of right leaning users using this important social media platform to further their political views.”
Truthy also aims to track which Twitter accounts are using the #teaparty and #drudgereport hashtags, although also liberal ones such as #p2.
How might conservatives use this advantage? The Truthy researchers leave little doubt when they maintain that this supposed conservative advantage on Twitter is “especially important in the context of the complex contagion hypothesis, which posits that repeated exposures to controversial behaviors are essential to the adoption of these behaviors.” In other words, the more people are exposed to conservatives on Twitter, the more likely they adopt conservative views themselves, which the authors view as “controversial”.
Such observations become chilling when the NSF points out that the Truthy project, for which it has already awarded $919,917 in grants, could help “mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda, and assist in the preservation of open debate.”
All this was too much for Pai, who wrote in the Washington Post:
Truthy’s entire premise is false. In the United States, the government has no business entering the marketplace of ideas to establish an arbiter of what is false, misleading or a political smear. Nor should the government be involved in any effort to squint for and squelch what is deemed to be ‘subversive propaganda.’ Instead, the merits of a viewpoint should be determined by the public through robust debate.
Given how much money the NSF throws around, it is hardly surprising that many people have come to its defense since Pai’s op-ed was published, insisting that Truthy is anything but scary. This latest controversy, however, will do nothing to enhance the NFS’s reputation with the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, which has accused the agency of wasting taxpayers’ money on frivolous research and is demanding that the NFS justify each award.
Alas, this NSF study is not the first time that the federal bureaucracy appears to target conservatives and stifle their views. In the IRS scandal, Internal Revenue Service officials have admitted that groups with conservative leanings, especially with the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their names, were targeted for special scrutiny and that their applications for tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)4 of the Internal Revenue Code were delayed on purpose.
And after a public outcry, the FCC itself also had to back off from an attempt to ask news media organizations intrusive questions about how they gathered news and how they reached their editorial decisions. Pai was, once again, also the whistle blower in that decision.
As it was with the IRS and FCC scandals, the American people need to be vocal in their condemnation of this challenge to our freedoms and Congress must intervene.
But because this has now become a disturbing pattern, we need to start thinking of this problem holistically. Rather than playing Whack-A-Mole every time a bureaucrat tries to stifle debate, the Heritage Foundation today is calling on Congress to look into whether the civil service has now become a political player that is abusing its authority and power.
We understand why bureaucrats who draw a government salary may be supporters of Big Government, but that doesn’t give them a right to harass conservatives or violate the First Amendment.
