A $250,000 grant went toward creating an ‘online escape room’ to help people identify misinformation, according to a new watchdog report.
The Biden administration has spent $267 million in taxpayer funds on research grants dedicated to combating so-called “misinformation” and investigating how it is spread, according to a new report from government spending watchdog Open the Books.
By contrast, the Trump administration spent just $6.7 million on grants around misinformation. Twelve of 16 of the grants awarded under the Trump administration funded technological developments to monitor social media and flag misinformation.
Spending on misinformation jumped from $2.2 million to $126 million from 2020 to 2021 alone as the Biden administration spend significant funding to address Covid-19 related misinformation.
A whopping $127 million has been spent on research related to Covid-19 misinformation and efforts to help people “overcome it” by listening to so-called public-health experts. Grants were mainly given to projects that either implemented programs to mitigate the impact of “misinformation” through on-the-ground advocacy, or to scientific studies and conferences on how misinformation is spread.
The report acknowledges the massive spending likely does not cover all the grants the Biden administration has awarded to combat misinformation, because its methodology involved adding up the total number of grants that mentioned “misinformation,” but transaction descriptions may not include “misinformation” as a keyword.
Grants reviewed by Open the Books largely came from the Department of Health and Human Services, which defines “misinformation” as “information that is false, inaccurate, or misleading according to the best available evidence at the time.”
“During the pandemic, health misinformation has led people to decline vaccines, reject public health measures, and use unproven treatments. Health misinformation has also led to harassment and violence against health workers, airline staff, and other frontline workers tasked with communicating evolving public health measures,” the HHS website explains.
While HHS spent $185 on misinformation-related grants, the National Science Foundation spent another $65 million and the Department of State accounted for another $12 million in spending.
“The federal government used both carrots and sticks, in the form of grants and censorious pressure campaigns, in the name of combating COVID misinformation. At the same time, it was working hand in glove with social media companies to silence critics of repressive COVID-19 policies,” the report says.
The Supreme Court ruled earlier this year in favor of the Biden administration in a case centered on government involvement in social-media censorship, finding that the plaintiffs lacked the standing to sue.
The Court found the plaintiffs — Missouri, Louisiana, and five social-media users — did not have standing to contest the level of coordination between government agencies, nonprofits, and tech platforms in restricting content on social media.
Nonetheless, the lawsuit unearthed documents that showed White House officials and employees at multiple federal agencies pressuring Twitter and Facebook into censoring scientific opinions that defied official Covid guidance. However many of those opinions, some of which were posted by credentialed public-health experts, ended up being right.
In one example of Covid misinformation being promoted by purported government experts, National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease director Anthony Fauci admitted earlier this year that the six feet apart rule for “social distancing” had no scientific basis and “sort of just appeared.”
“It appears the administration most concerned with ‘misinformation’ itself trafficked in misinformation: on masks, on risks to children, on social distancing, and on the need to vaccinate even infants. At least one grant specifically targeted the sitting president’s main political rival,” Open the Books reports.
One $200,000 grant project concluded that populist leaders and movements in the U.S. and other countries including Brazil, Poland and Serbia, kept people from coming together in “solidarity” and public officials need to have the “main say” on health guidance next time, seemingly taking a shot at President Trump’s leadership style.
Another $250,000 grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services gave the University of Washington funds to build an “online escape room hosted by librarians” to address misinformation.
Other grants went toward combatting alleged misinformation on an array of topics, including HIV, the HPV vaccine, and the opioid epidemic. One project even received $234,401 to “combat misinformation that negatively impacts public perception of crabbing and the commercial fishing industry.”
Open the Books also looked at contracts that mentioned misinformation and found the Department of Homeland Security had awarded a $1.2 million contract to defense contractor Guidehouse for “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation analysis.”
Misinformation-related spending has slowed, but still rests far above the pre pandemic levels; the Biden administration awarded $18.3 million in new grants in fiscal year 2024.