Looking ahead to our day, futurists often imagined that technology like artificial intelligence would set humanity free. Instead, Big Brother is working diligently to use these technologies to enslave us.
The White House under Biden is slated to award over $550,000 in public grant money to create an A.I. model that would be used in rapidly detecting “microaggressions” across social media.
According to government spending records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, the grant was made through Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and gives researchers at the University of Washington the funds to develop a technology that would ostensibly shield internet users from discriminatory language. To date, the researchers have already received $132,000 for this purpose, with a total of $550,436 expected to be given to them over the course of the next five years.
Specifically, the researchers’ work claims to be developing machine-learning models capable of reading through social media content to identify “implicit bias” and microaggressions, the latter being defined, per the standards of a former University of Washington research project, as language that might offend members of “marginalized” (read: “non-Christian, non-white”) groups.
If that sounds broad, it’s because it is. And while leftists won’t readily admit that they like it that way in order to deliberately crack down on speech they don’t agree with, the way they use this “microaggression” rhetoric speakers for itself.
For example, the lead researcher on this latest project at the University of Washington previously gave his opinion that simply praising meritocracy (the notion that skill and ability should determine placement) can be considered a microaggression.
The National Science Foundation, which awarded the grant, shot back at public criticism of this A.I. project. A spokesman for the foundation maintained that the project “does not attempt to hamper free speech.” He further contended that the resultant technology will create “automated ways of identifying biases in speech” while addressing the biases of human moderators.
But if the government wants us to believe there’s no political agenda behind the research, their cover is hard to maintain when one need take only a cursory glance at who’s involved to see that a clear left-wing bias exists.
The Free Beacon notes of the man heading the research, the University of Washington’s computer science professor, Yulia Tsvetkov:
Tsvetkov coauthored a 2019 study titled “Finding Microaggressions in the Wild,” which categorized microaggressions into subcategories, one of which was the “myth” that “differences in treatment are due to one’s merit.” Examples of microaggressions laid out in the paper included statements like “Your mom is white, so it’s not like you’re really black,” and questions including “But where are you from, originally?”
Tsvetkov also coauthored a July article that analyzed the “prominence of positivity in #BlackLivesMatter tweets” during the June 2020 George Floyd riots. Tsvetkov and her colleagues determined positive emotions like “hope, pride, and optimism” were prevalent in pro-Black Lives Matter tweets, evidence they said contradicts narratives framing Black Lives Matter protesters as angry.
Conservative organizations and watchdogs, however, raised the alarm about the ramifications of this research project.
“It’s not the role of government to police speech that some might find either offensive or emotionally draining,” Dan Schneider, vice president of the Media Research Center’s free speech division, told the outlet. “Government is supposed to be protecting our rights, not suppressing our rights.”
And Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said Biden’s funding of this A.I. technology is comparable to the Chinese Communist Party’s work to “censor speech unapproved by the state.”
The Biden White House has become notorious for its efforts to police online speech. It infamously launched the Disinformation Governance Board with that implicit aim. Although the agency was ostensibly scrapped rapidly after furious public backlash (with detractors referring to it as the “Ministry of Truth” from George Orwell’s 1984), it has, in reality, persisted in a more discreet, reorganized way — as The New American has previously reported.
Leaked documents, in fact, show that the Ministry of Truth is alive and well operating within the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The documents in question consist of a report from the agency’s advisory committee published in June. The report states that CISA “is positioned to play a unique and productive role in helping address the challenges” of “disinformation.”
The government’s role in censorship has become more apparent in recent days, as the “Twitter Files” have exposed the FBI’s control over Twitter prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of the social media platform. Per the files, The Bureau paid Twitter more than $3 million to censor posts the FBI didn’t like. And Twitter employed more than a few former agents.
If Biden and the leftist powers in government get their way, eventually none of us will be able to post online if our words offend the delicate sensibilities of the social justice tech overlords.
