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How did “fact-checking” become so ubiquitous?

Why was Covid propaganda so effective?

What does information warfare look like?

A new database of US Government spending on nearly 900 grants totalling over $1.5 billion (USD) related to mis- and disinformation (MDM) gives a clue.

I recently spent a couple of weeks reviewing this database, compiled by digital rights nonprofit liber-net, a job which involved reading every single database entry. What I learned was shocking, but not surprising.

From a near-billion dollar award from the Department of Defense (DoD) to military contractor Peraton in 2021 to “counter misinformation from US adversaries,” to $200,000 from USAID for a chatbot to counter unapproved vaccine narratives in Uzbekistan, to $24,800 from the State Department to “address the spread of populism” in Romania, these awards demonstrate the breadth of the US Government’s interest in narrative control, both geographically, and topically.

Tracked from 2010 to present, the pattern of US Government award spending shows a marked jump in MDM-related projects post-2016, the year of Trump and Brexit, and again from 2021, during the Biden/Covid era. Projects have been given red flag ratings for the level of insidiousness (more on methodology via liber-net).

This graph of USG award funding excludes the $979 million grant to Peraton (2021), which is so large it skews the visual. Image: liber-net data via Andrew Lowenthal on Substack.

Some of these were US Agency for International Development (USAID) grants, but a lot weren’t. The biggest spenders were the DoD, followed by USAID, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the State Department. Some are now completed, some were terminated with the incoming Trump administration, and over 140 remain active.

As emphasised by liber-net Director Andrew Lowenthal, the topline takeaway here is not “the US Government was trying to censor the world”, but rather that “the US government led and shaped the anti-disinformation field“.

For my part, these are the main threads I saw running through this extensive database of US Government spending. If anything, these observations simply confirm what many of us have suspected all along.

1. The proliferation of ‘fact-checking’ sites in recent years, and the increasing use of ‘fact-checking’ as a journalistic lens, was not organic. It was a major export of the US Government.

In this database alone, there are more than 80 awards specifically supporting fact-checking initiatives, ranging from $5.7 million down to $1,742.

Funded projects include fact-checking sites/operations in Croatia, Montenegro and Bulgaria, fact-checker bots in Armenia and Bolivia, journalism trainings in Sri Lanka, Mongolia or Kazakhstan, and serial grants to the Poynter Institute — which runs a massive global network of fact-checking organisations — to run trainings around the world and to expand its own operations.

There is just about no part of the world that the US Government has not thrown money at to push the fact-checking paradigm amongst journalists and other media professionals, and to ensure the proliferation of fact-checking operations.

Many of these grants were couched in language pertaining to the need to counter mis- and disinformation relating to Covid vaccines, elections, or Russian/Chinese influence. We know from practical experience and from rubrics used by MDM researchers that ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ are code for ‘disfavoured/unapproved facts and narratives.’

Across the board, anything supporting vaccine uptake, assuring election integrity, or promoting US foreign policy goals is assumed to be good information. Anything sceptical of vaccines, expressing concerns about elections, or sympathetic to Russia and China is assumed to be disinformation.

And these grants don’t include the bigger, broader narrative control initiatives which encompass surveillance, fact-checking, removal of undesirable information (censorship), and pushing of government messaging (propaganda).

They also don’t include disinformation operations spearheaded by the US Government, like the Pentagon’s anti-vax disinfo campaign to discredit the Chinese Sinovac vaccine in the Philippines.

2. If you fell for the Covid propaganda, just know the US Government spent millions of dollars to make sure you did, even if you live on the other side of the world.

It never occurs to these people that vaccine hesitancy could be for legitimate reasons. The logic inherent in the 80+ awards dedicated to combating vaccine misinformation and increasing vaccine uptake goes:

a) Not enough people are getting vaccinated, especially in minority groups;

b) It must be because of ‘misinformation’;

c) Therefore, we need to censor any information that might make people hesitant to vaccinate, we must pump the infosphere with approved messages, and we can leverage the relationships trusted influencers have with these communities to persuade people to trust us;

d) This will improve public health #equity.

To wit:

• $80 million from the CDC to its own foundation to increase Covid and flu “vaccine confidence and acceptance rates in target BIPOC communities.”
• $22.4 million from CDC to UnidosUS for its ‘Esperanza Hope for All’ campaign to increase the Latino community’s trust in public health messaging. This included “engagement of trusted influencers” to “broadly disseminate culturally and linguistically relevant information on the vaccine to foster trust in its safety and efficacy, thereby improving the potential participation rate among Latinos receiving the vaccine.”
• $3.2 million from NIH to the City University of New York to increase Covid vaccination in people with anxiety and depression.
• $7.6 million from CDC to City of Long Beach to “reduce Covid-19-related health disparities” and “see communication of key messages through racial and ethnic-specific media outlets regarding Covid-19 prevention, recovery, and disinformation.”
• $2.4 million from NIH to the University of Pennsylvania to use “natural language processing to pinpoint what makes specific messages convincing” to black and rural communities.

There are many, many more grants like this. Lest you imagine these efforts were targeted only towards Americans, awards within the liber-net database indicate that the US Government was also very concerned about increasing vaccine uptake in countries such as Ukraine (pre-Covid, $10.6 million from USAID), Kazakhstan, and Poland.

Additionally, some awards were to develop scalable AI models to identify and ‘address’ vaccine ‘misinformation’ which, if eventually adopted by global organisations like Meta, would affect everyone online, everywhere.

3. ‘Combating disinformation’ as information warfare

Again and again, ‘combating disinformation’ appears in this database as a euphemism for narrative control. Several clear themes were identifiable from the totality of US Government MDM-related grants over the past decade and a half:

• Countering Russian and Chinese influence
  See over 80 grants related to ‘combating Russian disinformation.’ The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) was a favourite for countering Chinese influence in the Australasian region, receiving more than $2 million over seven awards from 2020-present.
• Increasing vaccine confidence and uptake
  See point #2
• Allaying concerns about election integrity
  See over 50 election-related grants to shore up confidence in elections from the US, to Georgia, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, and Tanzania.

Narrative control efforts to give the US a competitive advantage over Russia and China make sense — this is what we expect of nation states. Why the US Government should be so invested in pushing vaccines and influencing the information environment surrounding the elections of small and far-flung nations is less obvious, unless you understand the US to be an empire representing the interests of major cartels and an ambitious deep state.

Not a recurrent theme, but deserving of an honourable mention is a $24,800 grant from the State Department to Freedom House in 2022 to “address the spread of populism” in Romania.¹ Populism is obviously like a bad virus that only stupid people contract, and must be eradicated before it spreads to more stupid people and they elect the wrong person.

Fast-forward to the present, and Romanian populist leader Calin Georgescu, who led at the voting booths in the 2024 presidential election, has been ousted by anti-democratic means twice. First, by the annulment of the first round of the 2024 election, in which he secured the most votes, leading to the cancellation of those elections altogether over alleged concerns about disinformation and cyber interference. And second, by the Central Election Bureau banning him from running in the election redo.

4. These people have no clue about how knowledge is created, negotiated, and shared. They really don’t get it.

I have written many a time about the naive assumption underlying a lot of the mis- and disinformation research and related policy-making that ‘the government is always right, everything else is misinformation.’ I imagine some key players are not naive at all and are cynically exploiting this paradigm, but my sense is that a lot of the people participating in this nonsense are simply blind to how flawed their base assumptions are.

I don’t have to explain to you that knowledge is collectively created, negotiated, and shared through an iterative process that takes place across time, but someone needs to explain it to the gumbies who genuinely think this will work:

ClaimBuster is “an end-to-end system for computer-assisted fact-checking. This system will monitor live discourses, social media, and news to catch factual claims, detect matches with a curated repository of fact-checks from professionals, and deliver the matches instantly to readers and viewers.”

“For various types of new claims not checked before, ClaimBuster will automatically check them against knowledge databases and report if they are truthful. For novel claims where humans must be brought into the loop, the system will provide algorithmic and computational tools to assist laypersons and professionals in understanding and vetting the claims.

“ClaimBuster, upon completion of the proposed work, is positioned to become the first-ever automated fact-checking system for use on a broad spectrum of factual claims. Its use will be expanded to verify claims in various types of narratives, discourses and documents such as sports news, legal documents, and financial reports. ClaimBuster will use database query, data mining, and natural language processing techniques to aid fact-checking.”

In short, it’s an automated fact-checking system that monitors “live discourses” to deliver instant corrections from “professionals.” Because the professionals are always right. And adjudication of truth claims can be automated. It’s really that simple, guys.

The NSF spent over half a million dollars across multiple grants to the University of Texas at Arlington and Duke University to get ClaimBuster up and running.

You can see how it works, below.

ClaimBuster: Source.

Most of the MDM grants in the database that speak of scalable technology, AI, and algorithms take some version of the ClaimBuster approach. Duke University received another $1.1 million, also from the NSF, to create “a scalable pipeline for identifying information deficits” about vaccines.

5. Encryption is a bug, not a feature

This was not so much a major theme as a red flag to keep an eye on — several grants dedicated to monitoring and countering unapproved narratives in private messaging channels.

One such project, “Combating the Spread of Disinformation on Encrypted Messaging Apps“, led by Stanford University under a $89,686 award from the NSF, was pithily summarised by liber-net:

“The researchers thought it was a shame that tech companies can’t read your private messages, as you might be spreading misinformation. How to stop it? An app that will read your encrypted messages to make sure you stay within the fact-checker-approved Overton Window.”

The NSF awarded a quarter of a million dollars to tech nonprofit Meedan for a similar project because “encryption on platforms such as WhatsApp, Viber, LINE, Telegram, and Signal protects the communications of millions of Americans but also potentially allows rumours, misinformation, disinformation, and other threats to spread.”

liber-net started compiling this database late last year, well before the palava over USAID funding cuts broke out through February and March this year, to create an accurate picture of the US Federal Government’s role in funding the counter mis- and disinformation sector.

I asked liber-net Director Andrew Lowenthal (researcher, Twitter Files contributor, and former Executive Director of Asia-Pacific digital rights nonprofit Engage Media), what was the most surprising discovery along the way?

He said it was the general worldview of the grant funders and recipients, “which is that the people at large are untrustworthy. That they aren’t capable of making their own decisions, or of discerning reality.

“And so an elite group is required to come up with solutions to help people make sense of the world. But instead of a grass-roots approach to dealing with this sense-making issue, they believe there needs to be a top-down approach.”

A priesthood of information oracles to save us from ourselves. They think, apparently.

View the liber-net database, ‘Federal Awards for “Mis-, Dis-, or Malinformation” and other content moderation initiatives, 2010-2025.’

Follow Andrew Lowenthal for more updates on this subject.

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Republished with thanks to Dystopian Down Under. Image courtesy of Adobe.