Earlier this month, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) requested records from the University of Wisconsin, the University of North Carolina, the University of Michigan, Indiana University, and the University of California, Los Angeles – five universities that have done one of three things: established censorship centers to target disfavored viewpoints, developed tools to do the same, or received money from the federal government to develop tools to combat so-called misinformation.
Representative Jim Jordan's (R-Ohio) subcommittee discovered the problem while investigating federal government contacts suppressing speech. They found grants the National Science Foundation made to different universities to develop censorship tools that could then be used with social media companies to stop citizens from speaking out on topics that did not align with government orthodoxy.
"We want to examine the extent to which these public universities have used taxpayer money to stop or target free speech and really get at their participation in what's called the censorship industrial complex, which is the interlocking and hidden network of public and private censors who work together to suppress disfavored speech," legal counsel Mathew Hoffmann explains.
This could cover viewpoint discrimination in anything from COVID shots to election integrity.
ADF's request asks for all communications between personnel with keywords like "misinformation," "hate speech," and "whole of society."
"We've been in negotiations with the universities," reports Hoffmann. "We do not have documents yet, but public records requests, especially … hoping to uncover a number of documents, can take a long time to get into production."
So for now, it is a waiting game.
ADF has said it plans to send several more Freedom of Information Act requests to multiple government agencies in the coming days seeking information on government collusion with organizations that may work to censor Americans' speech.
