The Biden administration is steering hundreds of thousands of dollars to a university to thwart so-called COVID-19 “misinformation” and “disinformation” alleged to target Hispanics on social media, records show.
President Joe Biden has escalated government efforts to fight purported disinformation, including through coordination with social media companies on content moderation, which Republicans have likened to “censorship.” The Department of Health and Human Services is now granting $500,000 to Texas Woman’s University, a public school in the Lone Star State, “to expand research on mitigating the effect of misinformation and disinformation” in connection to “COVID-19 prevention and treatment initiatives among Hispanics,” according to funding records reviewed by the Washington Examiner.
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The grant program, which started May 10 and ends in April 2024, and is listed under the HHS’s Food and Drug Administration, could propel GOP lawmakers to launch further investigations into the Biden administration to better understand its initiatives to derail certain speech. House Republicans are aiming to use the appropriations process to establish budget mandates that would bar federal agencies from bankrolling “disinformation” related initiatives in the United States, the Washington Examiner reported.
Meanwhile, the HHS under Secretary Xavier Becerra has come under fire for its ties to purported disinformation and misinformation tracking. Agency officials advised Twitter and Facebook staff in 2021 on combating coronavirus-related content, documents show. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy disclosed in an August 2021 call with education groups that the government was “working to combat misinformation in many ways, one being working with tech companies,” according to emails.
“I have no confidence this is anything more than Biden’s HHS spending money we don’t have on government censorship efforts,” Brian Harrison, ex-HHS chief of staff under former President Donald Trump and now a GOP Texas state House member, told the Washington Examiner.
In a description for the Texas Woman’s University program, HHS says there are “health disparities and inequitable gaps” facing minorities, adding that it is “imperative” to study the dissemination of content that purportedly targets Hispanics. The university is being tasked with the development of a “social network analysis” to track “misinformation consumed by the Hispanic community,” conducting focus groups with Hispanics, and completing “an economic impact analysis of proposed informational strategies for Hispanics,” grant records show.
The study is occurring in El Paso, Texas, and will involve analyzing social media data in both English and Spanish, according to HHS. It will also involve the “development of a longitudinal misinformation/disinformation index,” which HHS says “will allow estimating degrees of misinformation and disinformation impact over time and between ethnic groups.”
The mention of an apparent “index” by HHS to track alleged online falsehood comes after multiple Washington Examiner reports on how the State Department’s Global Engagement Center under Biden granted funds to the Global Disinformation Index. The British think tank has continued to come under fire for its covert operation of feeding blacklists of conservative media outlets to advertisers with the intent of shutting down disfavored websites.
Anne Feldman, a spokeswoman for HHS, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner the agency “does not censor speech.”
However, Mike Benz, the Trump State Department’s former deputy assistant secretary for international communications and information policy, thinks the grant “is effectively racial censorship targeting.”
“The first action to be taken by the grantee is to ‘develop a social network analysis model to estimate the degree of COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation consumed by the Hispanic community,'” Benz told the Washington Examiner. “This means the government will be funding strangers to trawl through the trenches of personal conversations between Spanish-speaking US citizens who talk to one another about COVID-19, and then those strangers will tactically target Hispanic ‘wrong thinkers’ to censor them completely out of the American conversation.”
Benz, now head of the free speech watchdog Foundation for Freedom Online, added that the grant in a different era “would be a scandal of untold proportions” but that today, “it’s just one more brick in the government’s censorship wall.”
Texas Woman’s University declined to respond to a detailed list of questions from the Washington Examiner on the “disinformation” grant. Matthew Flores, a spokesman for the school, said, “I doubt there’s been much data gathered to produce findings.”
Revelation of the university grant comes days after a Washington Examiner report detailed how House Republicans are exploring multiple avenues to choke off taxpayer dollars from going toward programs they say censor conservatives. House Small Business Committee Republicans also demanded last week that the Global Engagement Center turn over “unredacted” grant records, claiming that “the federal government has undermined First Amendment principles by working to censor certain viewpoints by proxy.”
In signaling support for the agency spending restrictions and explaining his reasoning, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) cited the infamous Disinformation Governance Board. The Department of Homeland Security shuttered the board in August 2022 after backlash and fears from the GOP that it could be weaponized to silence right-leaning voices.
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The board’s ex-director, Nina Jankowicz, who resigned, accused Fox News in a lawsuit in May of defaming her through critical coverage. Jankowicz faced criticism from conservatives for boosting debunked claims from Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign that Donald Trump colluded with Russia and also that Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop is “Russian disinformation.”
Konstantinos “Gus” Dimitrelos, an ex-Secret Service agent and cyber forensics expert, concluded with “100% certainty” in 2022 that the laptop is Hunter Biden’s after being commissioned by the Washington Examiner for forensic analysis.
