The National Science Foundation’s “Convergence Accelerator Track F” Is Funding Domestic Censorship Superweapons

Currently, Course Correct primarily targets US citizens who are thought dissidents in two topic areas: vaccine hesitancy and electoral skepticism (i.e. Trump supporters who question mail-in ballots, early voting dropboxes, voting machine efficacy, or other election integrity issues).

In case the political bias at play here is not immediately obvious, Course Correct gives precise examples of the “political misinformation” its AI tools target in its video presentation, where it highlights “misinformation spreaders” in the persona of former President Donald Trump. During the 2020 election cycle, the demo video suggests, then President Trump pursued an election integrity lawsuit in the state of Wisconsin that Course Correct designated as being rooted in misinformation:

Track F uses the tagline of “Trust and Authenticity in Communication Systems.” But this is a euphemistic way of saying if trust in government and mainstream institutions cannot be earned, it must be installed.

By science.

A thinner pretext for the creation of military-grade domestic censorship technologies could scarcely be provided. The NSF 2022 Portfolio Guide simply says Track F was created because “Although false claims… have existed throughout history, the problems that they cause have reached critical proportions.”

That’s it. Misinformation has hit critical proportions – that’s why your tax dollars are paying for censorship technologies at NSF.

Here’s a round-up of the portfolio companies that have gotten government funding from Track F. Bear in mind each of these teams have received $750,000 in initial government funding for the Phase I prototyping, and are eligible for up to $5 million more in funding for the Phase II technical development:

• Expert Voices Together—Led by George Washington University, Expert Voices Together, or EVT, is building a rapid-response system to assist journalists, scientists, and other experts whose work is being undermined by coordinated online harassment campaigns. Modeled on best practices in trauma-informed crisis intervention, the EVT platform provides a secure environment for experts to receive support from their professional communities. [Promo Video]
• Search Lit—Led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Search Lit is a suite of customizable, human-centered, open-source interventions that combats misinformation by building the public’s capacity at scale to sort truth from fiction online. The team brings expertise in large scale learning, ethnography, and digital search education, with partners in military, healthcare, and public libraries. [Promo Video]
• TrustFinder—People need tools to filter misinformation and find trustworthy signals in a sea of noise and data. Led by the University of Washington, TrustFinder assists researchers in collaboratively de-risking information exchange by binding digitally-signed annotations to data on the web. TrustFinder empowers communities to co-create information structures, influencing systems and algorithms towards more human outcomes. [Promo Video]
• WiseDex—Social media companies have policies against harmful misinformation. Unfortunately, enforcement is uneven, especially for non-English content. Led by University of Michigan, WiseDex harnesses the wisdom of crowds and AI techniques to help flag more posts. The result is more comprehensive, equitable, and consistent enforcement, significantly reducing the spread of misinformation. [Promo Video]

Deeper Dive: The DARPA Connection

One of the most disturbing aspects of the Convergence Accelerator Track F domestic censorship projects is how similar they are to military-grade social media network censorship and monitoring tools developed by the Pentagon for the counterinsurgency and counterterrorism contexts abroad.

In 2011, DARPA created the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program “to help identify misinformation or deception campaigns and counter them with truthful information” on social media. At the time, with the Arab Spring in bloom, the role of social media in burgeoning political movements was of great interest to US military, diplomacy and intelligence officials.

DARPA launched SMISC with four specific program goals:

For DARPA, AI tracking and neutralization of hostile speech online was a way of eliminating the reliance on luck to have an early-warning radar system for hostile foreign political activity in conflict zones or during crisis events. As the SMISC program founder wrote in 2011:

In October 2020, shortly before the US 2020 election, DARPA announced its INfluence Campaign Awareness and Sensemaking (INCAS) program that sought to “exploit primarily publicly-available data sources including multilingual, multi-platform social media (e.g. blogs, tweets, messaging), online news sources, and online reference data sources” in order to track geopolitical influence campaigns before they become popular.

Even the dates of DARPA’s social media censorship and monitoring dreams align with the NSF Convergence Track F projects. For example, the Track F program at NSF was created in September 2021.

That very month, in September 2021, DARPA simultaneously launched a new research project called Civil Sanctuary “to develop multilingual AI moderators to mitigate ‘destructive ideas’ while encouraging ‘positive behavioral norms.’”

It sounds, in many ways, like the exact promotion demo for WiseDex:

Is Civil Sanctuary a vehicle for social media censorship?

According to the opportunity announcement, Civil Sanctuary “will exceed current content moderation capabilities by expanding the moderation paradigm from detection/deletion to proactive, cooperative engagement.”

The announcement doesn’t rule out censorship via detection/deletion, but the program’s main focus will be on proactively engaging social media communities with multilingual AI moderators.

Why is DARPA launching this program?

According to the Civil Sanctuary announcement, “social media environments often fall prey to disinformation, bullying, and malicious rhetoric, which may be perpetuated through broader social dynamics linked to toxic and uncritical group conformity.”

In other words, the Pentagon’s research arm sees social media groups as having a hive mindset that bullies the community while promoting “disinformation.”

DARPA’s response is, “New technologies are required to preserve and promote the positive factors of engagement in online discourse while minimizing the risk of negative social and psychological impacts emerging from violations of platform community guidelines.”

Here’s what DARPA has to say:

“Civil Sanctuary will scale the moderation capability of current platforms, enabling a quicker response to emerging issues and creating a more stable information environment, while simultaneously teaching users more beneficial behaviors that mitigate harmful reactive impulses, including mitigating the uncritical acceptance and amplification of destructive ideas as a means to assert group conformity.”

Oh course, as FFO has previously covered, the Pentagon has increasingly made forays into sponsoring domestic censorship well beyond the theoretical DARPA purview.
One shocking example is the Biden Administration’s Defense Department taxpayer-funded government contract in September 2021 worth $750,000 to Newsguard. Interestingly, September 2021 is both when the Track F program started at NSF and when DARPA launched its Civil Sanctuary military censorship project. $750,000 is also the exact amount of funding all Track F NSF grantees received for their Phase I seed grant.

Newsguard is perhaps the preeminent censor and demonetizer of independent news websites:

It is also noteworthy that the Pentagon’s contract funding Newsguard was for the task of identifying “Misinformation Fingerprints.” This “misinformation fingerprinting” is a common theme among Track F NSF grantees, such as Course Correct, WiseDex, TrustFinder, SearchLit, CommuniTies, Co-Insights, CO:CAST and AART.

This troubling convergence is made all the more disturbing by its virtually identical similarity, in the domestic political context, to the CIA and NSA’s “Birds Of A Feather” political tracking ambitions established in the 1990s for the purpose of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism:

Quoting Quartz in its excellent 2017 report, “Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance“:

The research arms of the CIA and NSA hoped that the best computer-science minds in academia could identify what they called “birds of a feather:” Just as geese fly together in large V shapes, or flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in harmony, they predicted that like-minded groups of humans would move together online. The intelligence community named their first unclassified briefing for scientists the “birds of a feather” briefing, and the “Birds of a Feather Session on the Intelligence Community Initiative in Massive Digital Data Systems” took place at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose in the spring of 1995.

Their research aim was to track digital fingerprints inside the rapidly expanding global information network, which was then known as the World Wide Web. Could an entire world of digital information be organized so that the requests humans made inside such a network be tracked and sorted? Could their queries be linked and ranked in order of importance? Could “birds of a feather” be identified inside this sea of information so that communities and groups could be tracked in an organized way?

By working with emerging commercial-data companies, their intent was to track like-minded groups of people across the internet and identify them from the digital fingerprints they left behind, much like forensic scientists use fingerprint smudges to identify criminals. Just as “birds of a feather flock together,” they predicted that potential terrorists would communicate with each other in this new global, connected world—and they could find them by identifying patterns in this massive amount of new information. Once these groups were identified, they could then follow their digital trails everywhere.

NSF Track F grantee Course Correct is now building a digital dashboard for domestic “misinformation” that seems to perfectly track the CIA-NSA-DARPA dream of the 1990s for tracking and neutralizing “birds of a feather” terrorist communities:

We are building the core machine learning data science and artificial intelligence technology to identify misinformation, using logistics, network science, and temporal behavior, so that we can very accurately identify what misinformation, where misinformation is spreading, who is consuming the misinformation, and what is the reach of the misinformation.

The misinformation is coming from a separate part of the country or, you know, it is people with a certain perspective, a political view, who are sharing a certain misinformation. You want to be able to tailor the correction based on that because otherwise there’s a lot of research that says that actually corrections don’t help if you’re not able to adjust or tailor it to the person’s context.

The fact that DOD grantees and NSF grantees both primarily target the two same sets of domestic actors for censorship — right-wing populist political speech and Covid-19 heterodoxy speech, is noteworthy as well: