The Cost of Censorship: Biden Admin’s Misinformation War Chest

We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.

It may well be that the stupidest – but also most dangerous – new word to enter the mainstream lexicon in the past decade is “misinformation.” Quite apart from the Orwellian “Newspeak” (à la 1984) undertone, it’s a word with a meaning that is entirely subjective. How is that possible? Simply put, just about any fact, statistic, description of an event, or opinion could be classified as misinformation, depending on who is doing the classification. The last thing rational human beings should wish for is that their government – no matter who is leading it – confers upon itself the authority to decide what is and is not misinformation. Then, worse still, to have the government actively seek to suppress anything to which it has arbitrarily applied this term. Yet that is just what the Biden administration has been doing for the past four years – and spending hundreds of millions of US taxpayer dollars to do it.

A report by the nonpartisan government accountability watchdog Open the Books reveals shocking details of how far the outgoing administration went to control what news, information, and opinions the American people were permitted to consume. That isn’t to say that Joe Biden directed these efforts himself or that this wasn’t happening before he took office. Clearly, this goes beyond the work of any one elected official.

Open the Books found that government spending on various projects designed to combat misinformation goes back to at least FY2017 and that there was a massive uptick in spending after the COVID-19 outbreak. The watchdog group also discovered that the vast majority of the approximately $273 million spent on this unprecedented effort to kill freedom of speech was dished out since 2021. In fact, on Biden’s watch, no less than $267 million was distributed in the form of “grants” to various entities engaged in the suppression of so-called misinformation.

“Federal spending records show at least $127 million tax dollars [sic] funding anti-misinformation efforts directly related to COVID-19 for a variety of activities, from on-the-ground advocacy working to dispel vaccine misinformation, to scientific studies on how supposed misinformation is spread online [emphasis by Open the Books].”

What is noteworthy here is that money was spent on studying how misinformation is spread. Does that sound at least a little bit like a scam? One could be forgiven for thinking it does. In this information age, it doesn’t take government-funded research to figure out how information – any information – is spread online. A focus group of 15-year-olds could have explained that.

The study also noted that the Biden administration worked with social media platforms to censor online content that “often included cases where people simply questioned or disagreed with the Administration’s COVID policies.” […]

— Read More: www.libertynation.com