{"id":1531373,"date":"2025-04-20T15:40:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-20T19:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1531373"},"modified":"2025-04-20T15:40:00","modified_gmt":"2025-04-20T19:40:00","slug":"the-numbers-behind-the-governments-anti-misinformation-explosion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/the-numbers-behind-the-governments-anti-misinformation-explosion\/1531373\/","title":{"rendered":"The Numbers Behind The Government’s Anti-Misinformation Explosion"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Numbers Behind The Government’s Anti-Misinformation Explosion<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Greg Collard via Racket News<\/a>,<\/em><\/p>\n

You likely already know from reading Racket <\/em>that the Biden administration was very active in targeting misinformation and disinformation, even as it engaged in those practices.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Illustration by Daniel Medina\/Racket News<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Racket\u2019s Twitter Files<\/a><\/em> and other reporting have extensively documented many of the anti-disinformation and misinformation programs and organizations that the federal government supported, like the Election Integrity Project<\/a>, Cyber Threat Intelligence<\/a> (CTI League), and the Center on Narrative, Disinformation and Strategic Influence<\/a> at Arizona State.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But the number of grants? We didn\u2019t know that. Now we do.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Free Press<\/a><\/em> reports that since 2017, the federal government has awarded about 800 grants to counter mis\/disinformation \u2014 and the Biden administration is responsible for more than 600 of them<\/strong>. The 800 grants amount to more than $1.4 billion.<\/p>\n

The findings by reporters Gabe Kaminsky and Madeleine Rowley are based on a new database<\/a> of anti-mis\/disinformation programs. The database was created by the free speech advocacy group liber-net<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cA large number of these projects cynically employed the \u2018misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation\u2019 framework to counter their political adversaries, with U.S. government funding making it possible<\/strong>,\u201d liber-net\u2019s director, Andrew Lowenthal, told the Free Press<\/em>.<\/p>\n

President Trump signed an executive order<\/a> on his first day in office that accused the Biden administration of violating free speech rights \u201cunder the guise\u201d of combatting misinformation, disinformation and malinformation.<\/p>\n

But Kaminsky and Rowley found that several of the programs were continuing under the Trump administration \u2014 at least until they started asking about the grants, as Kaminsky explains to Racket<\/em>.<\/p>\n

We reached out to agencies to understand if these programs would continue under President Trump. What we found was a groundswell of federal officials taking the information and letting us know that they were either terminating the programs, investigating them, or adjusting internal policies as to how they characterize some of these programs to ensure alignment with the President’s executive order on \u201crestoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship\u201d that he signed on his first day in office. Some agencies, however, didn’t respond, or, in the case of the National Science Foundation, declined to comment.<\/em><\/p>\n

In one example the Free Press<\/em> cites, NIH director Jay Bhattacharya sent an email marked \u201cURGENT\u201d to employees to investigate grants and contracts related to \u201cfighting misinformation or disinformation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Free Press<\/em> found several dozen grants that have since been canceled, such as $683,000 awarded to UC-Irvine in December.<\/strong> The money would have gone toward studying the influence of social media and \u201cmisinformation on vaccine acceptance among black and Latinx individuals.\u201d The study would have done that by enrolling 500 people who follow vaccine-hesitant influencers on X.<\/p>\n

Although most mis\/disinformation grants occurred under Biden, they started with some regularity during the first Trump administration. Here\u2019s a graphic from liber-net that shows how the number of grants ballooned from Trump to Biden:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The organizations that receive grants typically dole out portions of the money to other organizations. Kaminsky explains how they work:<\/p>\n

Gabe Kaminsky:<\/strong> Like many federal programs, there are often subgrantees or subcontractors. So, while Maddie Rowley and I found that the Biden administration had awarded north of 600 grants and contracts to outside organizations, that number only accounts for primary awards. Take the $2 million that the Department of State awarded in 2023 to the Vermont-based NGO World Learning to, in its telling, \u201csupport the Armenian media sector’s overall resilience to disinformation.\u201d For that program, which ended in February 2025, World Learning dished out a sub-award of $275,219, or 13% of the primary award, to the Poynter Institute.<\/p>\n

And for Poynter, that’s nothing new. For example, I reported last year that Poynter had received a sub-award from the State Department’s since-shuttered Global Engagement Center\u2014which Republicans accused of censoring conservatives in the United States. Poynter received the GEC funding via the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, a London-based entity.<\/p>\n

Greg Collard: Although most grants were during the Biden administration, they were also awarded during the first Trump administration. Was there a difference in the types of grants that were awarded?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

GK:<\/strong> Post-2017 is really when these programs were kicked into gear, speeding up dramatically under Biden. The same grantees and contractors that ended up receiving large amounts in funding under Biden often had initially received some during the first Trump administration. As to why that was is I think a mix of Republicans being in the dark as to the programs, and\u2014as was evident broadly across the first Trump administration\u2014there being agencies that sort of operated how they desired irrespective of Trump’s stated policies. Trump did not know how Washington worked.<\/p>\n

However, I would say that the descriptions of programs on federal documents under Biden was a notable difference\u2014as some appeared to more specifically align with the ideological priorities of the Democrats: using terms like \u201cracial equity,\u201d \u201cLatinx,\u201d or other left-leaning terminology championed by the Biden administration. Under Trump 1.0, in other words, the anti-misinformation circus quietly gained a foothold in the U.S. by advertising itself in broad strokes that, in theory, many might agree with: countering extremism or online harassment, for example.<\/p>\n

But in practice, the programs were far more complicated and often partisan.<\/p>\n

Active Grants<\/h4>\n

Although many anti mis\/disinformation programs have been shut down, many remain active \u2014 including the largest grant: a $979 million award to military contractor Peraton, courtesy of the Department of Defense. Peraton landed the grant in 2021 to help the U.S. Central Command \u201ccounter misinformation,\u201d liber-net\u2019s Lowenthal writes in a Substack post<\/a> about the database.<\/p>\n

That grant alone easily makes the Defense Department the largest funder of mis-disinformation grants from 2016 to 2024. USAID was the second-largest funder at $149 million.<\/p>\n

Smaller grants also remain active. One the Free Press cites is $6.8 million in multiple grants to the University of Washington for literary resources that help \u201crural communities and black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities\u201d identify misinformation. The grant description<\/a> says misinformation is a \u201cgrowing threat to American democracy,\u201d and that \u201cSolutions must not only provide the public with skills for determining the truthfulness of claims, but must also provide resources for addressing the social and emotional impacts of misinformation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nSun, 04\/20\/2025 – 11:40<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bhttps:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/political\/numbers-behind-governments-anti-misinformation-explosion<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Numbers Behind The Government’s Anti-Misinformation Explosion Authored by Greg Collard via Racket News, You likely already know from reading Racket that the Biden administration…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1531374,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1531373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbimBl-6qnz","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2025\/04\/https-3A-2F-2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com-2Fpublic-2Fimages-2F12d2eddc-6e8d-491d-acd2-ee088afc002a_2560x1440.jpeg-LLJ3HE.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1531373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1531374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1531373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1531373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1531373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}