Twitter’s censorship of Hunter Biden’s laptop stories in 2020 could soon be possible on an industrial scale — thanks to an AI tool built with funding from his father’s administration, a report from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee claimed Tuesday.
The report revealed how the Biden administration spent millions on artificial intelligence research designed to create anti-“disinformation” tools that could then be sent to social media giants.
And it revealed how researchers who got funding for the show – known as “Track F” – emailed each other to say that Americans can’t tell fact from fiction online, and that conservatives and veterans are more susceptible than general public.
The report was published by the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Government Armaments, chaired by Jim Jordan (R-OH).
It sheds new light on how funding from the National Science Foundation is given to elite institutions including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Madison-Wisconsin and the University of Michigan, for a program called “Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems.”
Republican lawmakers fear censorship could now be done on an industrial scale
“Track F” was launched to identify “false information” and create “educational and training materials” for those with a “vulnerability to disinformation methods.”
It is part of a larger initiative, the “Convergence Accelerator Program,” which aims to solve issues with “significant national impact” by seeking high-level research and which is quietly launching in 2021.
In theory, a tool like this could be used to remove child pornography or fake photos — like the nude images created by Taylor Swift.
But the Republican report detailed how researchers working on the technology aim to censor the public, with the manager of the $13 million program Michael Pozmantier describing it as “focused on combating misinformation/misinformation.”
A presentation to the NSF revealed the researchers proposed “externalizing… censorship” outside the company. House Judiciary Committee
At MIT, one researcher told NSF officials “most people cannot effectively sort truth from fiction online.”
Researchers specifically cited “military veterans, older adults, military families” and those in “rural and indigenous communities” as particularly vulnerable to believing misinformation.
At the University of Michigan, a researcher who received millions suggests one possible outcome of the research is the outsourcing of content “moderation” decisions from social media platforms to government officials.
“Our disinformation service helps policymakers on platforms who want to… offload the responsibility for hard judgment to someone outside the company… by externalizing the hard censoring responsibility,” a researcher at the University of Michigan said in a pitch to the NSF.
One researcher suggests that groups who read the Bible or the Constitution may be exposed to misinformation. House Judiciary Committee
Another researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who received funding said the team was, “specifically focused on… doubts about the integrity of US elections and doubts related to the COVID-19 vaccine.”
The researchers pointed to certain groups such as those who read “the Bible or the Constitution” as being subject to misinformation.
“Because interviewees distrust both journalists and academics, they use this practice to fact-check how the media reports the news” — when in fact they don’t fully inform themselves, the researcher said in a message.
A researcher at the University of Washington who received funding to create a similar tool under another program — the Safe and Trusted Cyberspace program — wrote to NSF officials that countering misinformation is “political in nature” and ultimately “censorship.”
Chairman Jim Jordan has investigated the extent of federal government censorship. Getty Images
It’s unclear whether any of the tools have been finalized or will be adopted by social media companies.
Lawmakers like Jordan fear these tools could be perfected and used by platforms like YouTube, Reddit and Facebook to limit what people can see and say online in a massive expansion of the actions that led to the New York Post’s revelations about Hunter Biden’s laptop . suppressed by Twitter and Facebook before the 2020 presidential election.
The report is part of a larger investigation into the extent of the federal government’s efforts to restrict speech on social media platforms.
The committee previously said it had found that Facebook removed posts about the origins of Covid at the behest of the Biden Administration.
Discussions about the origins of Covid have been censored on Facebook. AP
Concerns over the growing tools for censorship come as Silicon Valley giants including venture capitalist Marc Andreesen and X owner Elon Musk warn artificial intelligence could give those in government more power to potentially suppress speech.
“Al is very likely to be the layer of control for everything in the world,” Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, wrote in an essay last June.
“You should realize how small and isolated groups of partisan social engineers are trying to define it now, under the cover of the old claim that they are protecting you.”
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
