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2024 Censorship Index: The U.S. Government’s Programs for Information Control

Since its inception, the Foundation for Freedom Online has documented the rise of U.S. government-backed censorship. 

The large number of government programs and sub-programs matches the number of pretexts used. We find DHS involved in censorship, in the name of both countering “domestic extremism” and protecting “election integrity.” We find HHS, with its focus on “COVID misinformation” and “vaccine misinformation.” We find the National Science Foundation, which funds advanced AI censorship techniques. And then there’s the foreign policy and military agencies, which fund “counter-disinformation” efforts at home and abroad.

This funding is disbursed amongst a wide variety of private and semi-private sector entities, from university research departments to tech startups and NGOs. 

FFO’s goal is to comprehensively document this vast network of taxpayer funded censorship. We will continue to update this article with new findings. Updates to this list will be added to the top of the article with clear labeling, and announced on social media.  

The National Science Foundation (NSF) 

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is one of the most prolific U.S. government funders of the censorship industry, funding research into advanced censorship techniques. 

  • The NSF funds the Community Computing Consortium (CCC), which includes Arizona State University’s Nadya Bliss and the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public’s Kate Starbird, a leader of DHS’s Election Integrity Partnership (see above). 
  • The NSF established the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program that includes core research on “information integrity,” and expands grants for funding disinformation efforts. SaTC has international partnerships with many international foreign research foundations across Czechia, Germany, Ireland, Israel, and India. Examples of SaTC research include: 
    • Enabling Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Combatting Disinformation and Racial Bias: A Deep-Learning-Assisted Investigation of Temporal Dynamics of Disinformation
    • Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Disinformation Detection and Analytics
    • An ongoing NSF SaTC track project is set to grant  $1.9 million between 2021 and 2026  to the University of Washington for “rapid-response frameworks for mitigating online disinformation.”

National Endowment for Democracy (NED)

The National Endowment for Democracy is an ostensibly “nongovernmental” and “independent” organization that happens to receive substantially all of its money from congressional appropriations. Unlike other nonprofits, NED is mandated to adhere to strict requirements to operate openly and transparently and to consult with the State Department regarding overseas programs before the commencement of activities. 

It has long been seen as an arm of U.S. overseas regime change and political influence efforts. In a 1991 Washington Post interview, its own founder admitted “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

NED Board Members

NED – Core Institutes

The NED gives a substantial portion of its federal budget to two of its “core institutes,” the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), both which have deep ties to the censorship industry. 

Along with the taxpayer dollars passed through NED and CEPPs, IRI and NDI receive additional funding directly from the State Department and USAID. Both have been involved in numerous efforts related to censorship. 

NED – Grantees

NED uses its grantmaking authority to fund thousands of grantee projects every year. The exact funding and breadth of censorship-related grantees is largely uncertain due to NED’s consistent noncompliance with federal transparency requirements, but evidence from journalist and watchdog investigations thus far point to the  funding for notorious censorship initiatives including:

NED has funded Bellingcat since at least  2017.

  • Musk has publicly called Bellingcat a firm that specializes in psyops and acknowledged it as a NATO propaganda shop.
  • Bellingcat’s founder, Eliot Higgins, called Elon “an absolute disaster for X,” and suggested the claims that Bellingcat was a propaganda shop originated  from Russian journalist-created  disinformation. Eliot Higgins was a fellow at the Atlantic Council DFR Lab, which was started under current NED CEO and President  Damon Williams during Williams’ previous stint as VP of the Atlantic Council. 
  • Francis Fukiyama, listed as a council member of NED’s Forum for International Studies, is also on Bellingcat’s international advisory board.
    • A major supporter of online censorship, Fukuyama has appeared on panels with members of the Election Integrity Partnership in which he mused on the possibility of ending the First Amendment.

NED made grants totaling $545,750 between 2020 and 2021 to the Global Disinformation Index (GDI).

  • GDI compiles and determines which information sources that advertisers should avoid. Its riskiest sites for advertiser exclusion includes New York Post, Newsmax, Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, The Federalist, while “least risky sites” include New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, HuffPost, BuzzFeed.

NED funds and was involved with the Poynter Institute’s efforts to assess credibility of fact-checking organizations. 

  • NED was listed as one of Poynter’s largest funders (NED’s name has since been deleted from their list of funders, but the link was recovered via Wayback Machine archive). 
  • NED employees were involved in an email list with UW CIP’s Kate Starbird, Clemson Media Forensic Hub’s Patrick Warren, and State Department officials, determining which groups should get the badge of approval from Poynter to enter the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN).

NED –  International Forum for Democratic Studies and Initiatives

Most federal funds not spent on grantees go towards NED’s International Forum for Democratic Studies and its related initiatives – listed as a “federal endowment initiatives” in NED’s latest publicly available financial audit. Initiatives folded under the NED International Forum for Democratic Studies include the Center for International Media Assistance, World Movement for Democracy, and The Information Space Program.

  • A key takeaway of their December 2022 “Digital Directions” forum is that “Elon Musk’s Twitter has become an increasingly inhospitable place for human rights defenders and democracy advocates worldwide, welcoming back purveyors of disinformation, malign narratives, and hate speech instead.” 
  • The World Movement for Democracy posted a paper titled “Emphasizing the Importance of the Right to Information in the Fight Against Disinformation.” The paper states the recent trends of “ global ascendency of populist politics is a real threat to consolidation of justice and democracy.” Authors blame “state actors and populists” for purveying “disinformation” and provide Boris Johnson’s claims about overpayments to the EU and former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s claims about Trump’s inauguration turnout as disinformation examples.
  • The Information Space program is a subset program of the International Forum for Democratic Studies, a center for research and analysis at NED.
    • Josh Machleder, the director of the Information Space program, served as the senior adviser for Media and Internet Freedom at USAID’s Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG).
  • Dean Jackson, former program manager of NED’s International Forum for Democratic Studies, is a prolific censorship industry consultant and staunch anti-Musker. Jackson: 
    • Helped create USAID Countering Disinformation Primer, alongside other NED and NDI staff, which advocated for censorship strategies.
    • Led a consensus-building project for the most notorious censorship organizations that culminated with his report for the Center of Democracy and Technology that said “political orientation” of one partner organization shifting could ruin the entire mission of the censorship industry.
    • Said “Musk is arguably a more proximate threat to Brazilian and American democracy than the Putinist or Chinese Communist regimes.” 
    • According to evidence provided in the U.S. House Committee on Small Business report on censorship, Dean Jackson is the NED official who told Poynter they should not give the Daily Caller credibility to enter the IFCN.
    • From the Committee on Small Business: “ As set forth in its Articles of Incorporation and the National Endowment for Democracy Act, it is a violation of the NED’s mandate to operate domestically, and therefore to interfere with the operations of domestic press.”

U.S. Department of State  – Global Engagement Center 

Perhaps among the worst government offices  involved in censorship, the State Department GEC’s stated mission  is  “to direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate U.S. Federal Government efforts to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.”In recent years,  GEC has been involved in laundering censorship of populist viewpoints and information sources through several  NGOs.

  • GEC is listed as a government stakeholder by the EIP on their post-2020 censorship report.
  • GEC  gave $100,000 between 2021 and 2022 Global Disinformation Index (GDI), the nonprofit also funded by NED that whitelisted legacy media while blacklisting even mainstream conservative media to advertisers. 
  • A  House Committee on Small Business investigation revealed  GEC grant funds were funneled through a subgrant to the Poynter Institute to assess organization’s credibility to enter the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), and  GEC officials were in an email chain that assessed organizations applying to get membership into the credibility  network.
  • GEC partnered with the Cambridge University Social Decision-Making Lab to create video games like Cat Park and Harmony Square, which “inoculate” players against disinformation. The game’s examples of false narratives tend to look like ordinary populist grievances against the establishment – a common theme is that government skepticism is framed as misinformation that needs to be dealt with.

U.S Department of State – Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs 

The Office of the  Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs oversees much of the State Department’s disinformation-related grants and  offices involved in censorship activities, including the Global Engagement Center.

  • Gave the Atlantic Council a $300,000 grant  to build a “transatlantic response to disinformation.” 
  • This grant was seemingly used to fund a conference involving conversations about cooperating on the EU Digital Services Ac (DSA)t. A  grant transaction description mentions a  June 2022 conference. 
  • The Delegation of the EU to the United States and the Atlantic Council hosted a  June 2022 EU-US Defense and Future Forum. During the conference,  members of an audience,  which included  officials from the  U.S.  State Department, asked questions to and attended a talk by Gerard De Graaf on the EU-US Digital Policy Agenda, largely centered around the DSA.
    • Gerard De Graff was the Director of Digital Transformation at the European Commission. He is responsible largely for the creation  of the DSA. De Graff was named Special Envoy for Digital to the US and head of the newly created EU San Francisco Office in September 2022, seemingly fitted near Silicon Valley to push American tech platforms into compliance with Orwellian European regulations.
  • Gave a $741,887 grant to the Atlantic Council to  build a network of Latin American journalists in Columbia, Brazil, and Honduras to counter PRC (People’s Republic of China) influence in the named countries and the region.
  • Gave a $30,000 award to an organization lobbying for state mandates for media literacy education, Media Literacy Now (MLN) to exchange counter-disinformation curriculum with German educators. 
    •  A Daily Wire investigation in January 2024 found that the State Department paid German censorship practitioners to train American teachers how to teach media literacy, with individuals from the controversial DHS-funded Rhode Island Media Education Lab were involved. Those involved took the opportunity during State Department seminars to promote Newsguard and Ad Fontes, for-profit organizations that specialize in discrediting conservative and non-establishment media sources.
  • Gave $78,000 to Arizona State University “to map and analyze public awareness of disinformation threats through an intelligence dashboard and propose actionable policy recommendations.”
  • Sent at least 7 grants from 2019-2024 to fact-checking organizations involved in the Brazilian Election Court’s counter-disinformation efforts. These efforts deployed a network of fact-checkers working with the Brazilian Election Court to determine which claims should be targeted by Brazil’s government as disinformation.
    • A $150,000 grant  to Poynter IFCN member organization Agencia Lupa to train fact-checkers
    • 6 grants to The Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji) totaling over $250,000 to train fact-checkers. 

U.S Department of State – Bureau of Democracy, Rights, and Labor (DRL)

USAID –  Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) 

Thought it brands itself an “aid” organization, the U.S. Agency for International Development and its $50bn budget serve as an arm of American soft power abroad. In recent years, that soft power has been used to encourage foreign partners, including governments, to pressure social media platforms for greater censorship — a strategy that seems tailor-made to cause blowback against American tech platforms that are overly free speech-friendly.

  • Created the internal disinformation primer promoting censorship strategies such as cutting advertising to disfavored news sources and operating initiatives such as the USAID/CEPPS Countering Disinformation Guide.  
  • The USAID Electoral Assistance Framework, a toolkit for USAID DRG personnel and foreign partners, promotes the practice of identifying actors who spread “hate speech and offensive/personal attacks” on social media. The toolkit lists resilience to disinformation/countering disinformation as a main programming objective (p. 23).  
    • The toolkit promotes “efforts to detect, monitor, expose, and combat disinformation, media literacy efforts, fact-checking platforms, and civil society advocacy for social media platform accountability” – or in other words encouraging foreign government and grassroots pressure against American social media companies. 

USAID – CEPPS 

  • The Consortium for Political Process Strengthening (CEPPS) is a consortium of the International Republican Institute (IRI), the International Democratic Institute (NDI), and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES).  
  • CEPPS administers the USAID Democratic Elections and Political Process (DEPPs) grant program and co-runs the countering disinformation guide with USAID, a site that catalogs counter-disinformation initiatives. 
  • The current “intervention spotlight” on the USAID/CEPPs censorship guidebook is the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation, a voluntary agreement for platforms to censor speech that served as an ominous precursor to the Digital Services Act. Elon Musk began facing investigation and criticism from EU censorship purveyors after controversially pulling X from participating in the Code.

  • Funding irregularities? While CEPPS appears to be an independent nonprofit, according to financial documents it appears to have had no operations or employee spending over the past year. It seems entirely set up as a conduit for USAID to fund core institutes of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), with the entire FY23 budget of CEPPS being funded by USAID and the entire spending going to either IFES or NED core institutes IRI and NDI. In fact, CEPPS has given more money in recent years to the NED core institutes than the NED did itself. 
  • In Brazil, multiple USAID-funded entities that received grants through CEPPS coordinated with the Superior Election Court’s (TSE) “counter-disinformation” efforts. The notoriously anti-Bolsonaro, anti-populist TSE ordered platforms to censor pro-Bolsonaro viewpoints and eventually banned American tech platform X after Elon Musk refused to comply with their censorship demands.

Department of Defense (DOD)

The Department of Defense has funded infamous censorship firms such as Newsguard, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council. This includes:

  • NewsGuard, the browser plug-in news rating tool, whose ratings system often skews heavily in favor of left-leaning sources and often targets conservative media outlets.
    • NewsGuard creates blacklists and whitelists for advertising companies to steer advertising revenue away from outlets Newsguard disfavors. 
    • NewsGuard revealed they have worked with the Cyber National Mission Force of the U.S. Cyber Command.
  • The Defense Department has funded Graphika, which is one of the four organizations that comprised the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP); the censorship coalition was deputized by CISA to censor the 2020 elections. 
    • The Pentagon also funds the Atlantic Council, one of the other organizations in the EIP coalition.
  • The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Study Group was created to have the country’s top computer scientists from academia, government, and industry recommend innovations and new areas of scientific research.
    • The Twitter Files and Public records obtained from the University of Washington by Protect the Public’s Trust  reveal that some of the notorious researchers involved in censorship of Americans have been involved in facilitating DARPA ISAT Study Group meetings. 
    • Stanford Internet Observatory censor Renee Diresta used her involvement in DARPA ISAT to coordinate a workshop involving other “disinformation” researchers, including the University of Washington’s Kate Starbird and then-Twitter CEO Yoel Roth. 
    • FOIA records  revealed that Arizona State University (ASU) Global Security Initiative Director Nadya Bliss  invited Starbird to a DARPA ISAT workshop.
      • Bliss previously chaired the DARPA ISAT group.
  • Defense Department grants to counter disinformation and misinformation include:
    • A roughly $12 million DARPA grant to develop technologies to automatically detect, attribute, and characterize falsified assets to defend against large scale automated disinformation attacks
    • An $11 million DARPA grant to develop technologies to automatically detect, attribute, and characterize falsified assets to defend against large scale automated disinformation attacks
    • A $749,387 Air Force grant to Newsguard for Newsguard’s Misinformation Fingerprints catalog of known hoaxes, falsehoods, and misinformation narratives
    • A $745,000 Air Force grant for rapid analysis campaigns for operators
    • $743,604 grant for detecting relations, entities, and attributes for misinformation
    • $72,321 grant for a software tool to proactively respond to global disinformation campaigns
    • $49,890 for information warfare protection against misinformation and disinformation
    • $49,890 for a machine learning tool for proactive disinformation/misinformation detection, assessment, and mitigation.

Department of Homeland Security – Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) 

Created by an Act of Congress in 2018 with the ostensible purpose of coordinating cybersecurity across the federal government, under the leadership director Chris Krebs CISA quickly pivoted towards the domestic censorship of “disinformation” as its top priority, arguably becoming the worst offender on this front in the Federal government. 

Department of Homeland Security – Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (TVTP) Program / Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3)

The Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Program at DHS, now under the umbrella of the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, has funded numerous censorship studies and initiatives, including:

DHS – Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)

While FEMA has been embroiled in recent controversy for their  mishandling of funds and Hurricane relief efforts, they apparently have devoted time to  an active role in administering some of the DHS’s most dubious counter-disinformation initiatives:

Includes “open-source analysis of disinformation and misinformation campaigns” and “educat[ing] the public on misinformation and disinformation campaigns to increase individual and community resilience” as example project types for the FY 24 Homeland Security Grant Program.

The Department of Justice – National Institute of Justice (NIJ) portfolio on Domestic Radicalization and Violent Extremism

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is the research wing of the Department of Justice. Its portfolio on Domestic Radicalization and Violent Extremism was established in 2012, and initially focused on tracking support for foreign terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda. In recent years however, the program’s focus has sharply switched to far more partisan domestic targets, as well as broad-based online censorship: 

The Department of Justice – FBI 

While its activities are shrouded in more secrecy than NIJ’s, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) was behind one of the most infamous cases of political interference and online censorship: the suppression of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story at the height of the 2020 election.

  • In a 2022 interview, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that FBI officials primed his company ahead of the New York Post story to prepare for a “dump” of information shortly before the election, and that it would be likely “Russian propaganda.” 
  • The claim was repeated by individuals closely tied to the intelligence community in the media. 
  • Facebook went on to censor the laptop story on the assumption that this was the “dump” that the FBI had warned of. 
  • Although the FBI knew the story was not “Russian disinformation,” officials refused to confirm this, despite queries from the same social media platforms they had previously warned, that were in the process of censoring the story. 

Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reportedly pressured big tech platforms to censor alleged coronavirus misinformation. 

The Office of the Surgeon General in 2021 released a Community Toolkit for Addressing Health Misinformation. The Surgeon General the same unveiled an advisory on combating alleged health misinformation, which called on big tech platforms to “impose clear consequences” for accounts that violate platform policies on spreading alleged misinformation. 

HHS has funded many anti-dis and -misinformation efforts, including:

  • The CDC gave the Georgia Tech Research Corp. $678,084 for a misinformation study starting in September 2022
  • The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) funded a $653,236.51 project to explore healthcare providers perceptions and experiences with public health emergency misinformation
  • The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded a $300,000 project studying medical misinformation in social media for targeted “interdiction” using advanced AI
  • The National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funded a $300,000 project to study real-time surveillance of vaccine misinformation from social media platforms using natural language process technologies
  • The National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funded a $299,993 project to study digital tools against misinformation about infectious disease treatments and vaccines
  • The National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) granted Gryphon Scientific $299,964 to study systematic understanding and elimination of misinformation online 
  • The FDA Office of Acquisitions and Grants Services (OAGS) funded a $224,478 grant studying combatting the “COVID-19 infodemic” through evidence-based misinformation management strategies
  • The FDA Office of Acquisitions and Grants Services (OAGS) funded a $25,100 project to conduct online questionnaires and experimental studies on many health topics, including opioids, biosimilars, medical misinformation, etc. 

Department of Education (DoE)

The education system has played an important role in censorship. Many American universities have established centers dedicated to studying mis- and disinformation, but their activities have gone far beyond passive research or pedagogy in the traditional sense. University disinformation labs, their faculty, and even their students, have been utilized as “censorship laundering” hubs to censor the speech of Americans online on behalf of the federal government.  At the same time, the Department of Education is encouraging schools to inoculate students against “disinformation” through the use of media and digital literacy programs:

Internews

A “senior technical partner” of CEPPS, Internews is a U.S. based nonprofit that trains, funds, and supports friendly journalists abroad – and, more recently, works to censor “disinformation” that challenges their narratives. Like NED, it is a Cold War soft power organization that has been repurposed to advance internet censorship.

From CEPPS: 

U.S. Agency For Global Media (USAGM) – Open Technology Fund

The U.S. agency for global media, previously known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors, broadcasts American media worldwide. It supervises the media channels said to be instrumental in the downfall of communism: Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, as well as Radio Free Asia and the Office of Cuba broadcasting. In 2012, USAGM expanded into digital media with the creation of the Open Technology Fund. OTF’s mission statement to “support open technologies and communities that increase free expression” is reflective of a time when internet freedom was believed to support U.S. foreign policy interests. Today, it advances global and domestic censorship under the pretext of combating “disinformation.”

  • OTF funds several censorship-related initiatives in its “Internet Freedom and IF technologies” funding track, including a “claims and memes database from Meedan, a tech firm that has created a system to allow WhatsApp users to report each other to centralized censors.
    • Fact-checkers, civil society organizations involved in countering disinformation, and even governments like the Brazilian Election Court have created their own efforts to get ordinary people to report each other’s text messages to Meedan’s backend database through tiplines. 
  • OTF also funded Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, which creates technologies like Botometer, a tool that purportedly calculates the likelihood of a Twitter account being a bot.
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