Near the end of the Biden administration, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, were awarded a $683,000 federal grant to investigate how misinformation and disinformation on social media impact “vaccine acceptance among black and Latinx individuals.” UC Irvine said it would enroll “followers of known vaccine-hesitant influencers” and “develop a tool” to visualize its findings.
The award is among more than 800 federal grants and contracts since 2017, totaling more than $1.4 billion, to help curb speech considered by the U.S. government to be misinformation and disinformation. More than 600 were made during the years when Joe Biden was president.
The Biden years saw heightened public scrutiny of some of these programs, which Republican lawmakers and free speech groups criticized as “censorship” devices in the U.S. That culminated in an executive order from President Donald Trump on his first day in office that accused the government of violating the free-speech rights of Americans “under the guise of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.’ ”
But until now, it has not been clear just how much taxpayer money was spent on these programs and how many federal agencies were involved in the effort. Indeed, it was only when The Free Press began contacting agencies for comment about programs listed in federal documents as active that officials in the Trump administration began to scrutinize them more closely—launching investigations and evaluating internal policies.
Since then, federal officials have terminated at least several dozen programs related to misinformation and disinformation, according to documents and interviews.
After The Free Press asked the National Institutes of Health about last year’s grant to UC Irvine, it was canceled. The NIH also canceled a $22.4 million award to progressive Latino advocacy group UnidosUS for a campaign to counter misinformation and disinformation about Covid.
NIH director Jay Bhattacharya sent an email, two days after the agency received The Free Press’s questions, that was marked “URGENT” and instructed employees at the government’s primary funder of medical research to investigate grants and contracts related to “fighting misinformation or disinformation.”
An NIH spokesperson told The Free Press that the agency is “taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned” with new priorities.
A senior State Department official said the agency “is just getting started” on cuts there.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has vowed to end “censorship of the American people” by the State Department, and the agency is quickly taking steps to align with that mission. On Wednesday, Rubio placed on leave dozens of full-time staff who had worked at the Global Engagement Center. Republicans had accused the office of censorship under Biden and moved to shut it down in late 2024.
After The Free Press sought comment from the State Department for this article, officials began adding “no-cost amendments” to some awards, requiring the recipients to certify “compliance with applicable federal anti-discrimination laws.”
At the Pentagon, officials are also reviewing all contracts to ensure alignment with Trump’s executive order, a senior Pentagon official told The Free Press.
The official said the Pentagon has begun changing internal terminology that describes certain programs as countering disinformation and misinformation to “countering adversary propaganda and information operations.”
Misinformation is often defined as false or inaccurate information, while disinformation is typically viewed as a form of propaganda that is intended to mislead. The U.S. has funded many anti-disinformation initiatives aimed at repelling interference in U.S. elections by foreign adversaries such as Russia, China, and Iran. Those anti-U.S. efforts include sowing discord on social media.
Trump’s executive order directed the Justice Department to work with other agencies to investigate “the activities of the federal government over the last four years that are inconsistent with the purposes and policies” of Trump’s anti-censorship order.
The edict was the culmination of Republican-led investigations, lawsuits, and other efforts in Congress during the Biden years to block funding to groups the GOP accused of unconstitutionally silencing speech, including theories about a lab leak causing Covid-19 and news reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The largest active anti-misinformation award is a $979 million Pentagon contract with defense company Peraton to help the U.S. military counter foreign adversaries. As part of the program, Peraton is working with the U.S. Central Command to identify threats to U.S. national security, according to a person familiar with the contract. Peraton declined to comment.
“A range of adversaries are actively trying to spread false information to Americans, and part of the job of the government should be to try to stop that,” said Daniel Byman, a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. “I am always surprised that that is a controversial take.”
Critics have said the abundance of federal funding created an opportunity for the recipients of grants and contracts to inject their political views and meddle in U.S. policy.
“A large number of these projects cynically employed the ‘misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation’ framework to counter their political adversaries, with U.S. government funding making it possible,” said Andrew Lowenthal, chief executive of a free speech watchdog group called liber-net.
He is a former research fellow at Harvard University and worked on the Twitter Files, an archive of internal Twitter communications opened up to journalists by Elon Musk to shed light on the social media platform’s content moderation policies.
Liber-net compiled anti-misinformation and anti-disinformation programs into a publicly accessible database. The database offers the fullest picture yet of such programs and includes awards from as long ago as 2010.
While many of the grants have been fully paid out or terminated, others, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, remain active.
Some of the active awards involve groups criticized by Republicans in recent years for allegedly fueling censorship.
For example, federal documents show $6.8 million in active grants to the University of Washington from the National Science Foundation. UW researchers said “inaccurate or misleading information has emerged as a growing threat to American democracy.” Most of the money is aimed at crafting “literacy resources” that help “rural communities and black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities” identify misinformation.
In 2020, the House Judiciary Committee said in a report that a group called the Election Integrity Partnership, which UW co-founded, had “worked with social media companies to censor true information, jokes and satire, and political opinion,” despite its stated purpose to fight misinformation and disinformation.
Victor Balta, a UW spokesman, told The Free Press that the funding has helped support “work to study the ways online rumors spread during crisis events and times of uncertainty, including the 2022 and 2024 U.S. elections, the Lahaina, Maui, wildfire in 2023, and the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign.”
That work included a study that criticized right-wing social media accounts for their “politically-driven villainization” of “professional journalists,” citing Republicans blaming the media for the attempted assassination of Trump in July 2024 at a Butler, Pennsylvania rally.
“To be clear, these projects in no way amount to ‘censorship,’ as they have not contributed to the removal or labeling of social media content,” the spokesman said.
Another award recipient, disinformation tracking company Graphika, also helped launch the Election Integrity Partnership. Graphika holds three contracts worth a total of $5.3 million through the Department of Defense.
Meghan Hermann, a Graphika spokeswoman, said the contracts “relate to technology for analyzing online activity by U.S. adversaries in foreign military theaters.” She said the company isn’t aware of its technology or data being leveraged by the U.S. government for censorship.
Researchers for the Election Integrity Partnership have insisted that it didn’t suppress domestic speech and examined disinformation only related to false election-related claims.
The senior Pentagon official said the contracts are part of the agency’s congressionally authorized mission to counter foreign propaganda.
But the agency is being careful to ensure it is aligned with Trump, the official added.
In Congress, powerful Republican lawmakers are now working with the Trump administration to identify further spending cuts. Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, told The Free Press some of the awards that are still active “may spark us to do additional things in some of the areas we haven’t quite dug into yet.”
In February, Jordan’s committee said the National Science Foundation funded “artificial intelligence–powered” censorship tools used by social media companies. The NSF previously said it “has no role in content policies or regulations.” It declined to comment for this article.
Brian Mast, a Florida Republican who leads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he is helping identify programs to cut as part of a State Department reauthorization process updating its policy priorities for the first time in more than two decades. The GOP-led committee “won’t let unelected bureaucrats waste taxpayer dollars censoring speech or pushing anti-American ideology abroad,” Mast told The Free Press.
This month’s new requirement by the State Department forcing some award recipients to certify “compliance with applicable federal anti-discrimination laws” applies to a $2.6 million grant to a Vermont-based nonprofit organization called World Learning, which said it would “build societal resilience to disinformation/misinformation.” The “no-cost amendment” was also added to a $100,000 grant to Tanzanian website Jamii Forums for fact-checking.
The status of some grants also remains unclear. Washington State’s broadband office was awarded $16 million to help thwart “online misinformation.” A Trump administration official said the money is on hold as part of an investigation into $2.7 billion in Biden-era “digital equity” grants.
But Amelia Lamb, a spokeswoman for the broadband office, told The Free Press, “We haven’t received any notice about potential cancellation and we’re proceeding with business as usual.”
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