By Nick Givas
Updated: January 26, 2023 - 1:14am
The government's campaign to fight "misinformation" has expanded to adapt military-grade artificial intelligence once used to silence the Islamic State (ISIS) to quickly identify and censor American dissent on issues like vaccine safety and election integrity, according to grant documents and cyber experts.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded several million dollars in grants recently to universities and private firms to develop tools eerily similar to those developed in 2011 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program.
DARPA said those tools were used "to help identify misinformation or deception campaigns and counter them with truthful information," beginning with the Arab Spring uprisings in the the Middle East that spawned ISIS over a decade ago.
The initial idea was to track dissidents who were interested in toppling U.S.-friendly regimes or to follow any potentially radical threats by examining political posts on Big Tech platforms.
DARPA set four specific goals for the program:
"Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes), and (b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.
Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social media sites and communities.
Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.
Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations."
Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online has compiled a report detailing how this technology is being developed to manipulate the speech of Americans via the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other organizations.
"One of the most disturbing aspects of the Convergence Accelerator Track F domestic censorship projects is how similar they are to military-grade social media network censorship and monitoring tools developed by the Pentagon for the counterinsurgency and counterterrorism contexts abroad," reads the report.
"DARPA's been funding an AI network using the science of social media mapping dating back to at least 2011-2012, during the Arab Spring abroad and during the Occupy Wall Street movement here at home," Benz told Just The News. "They then bolstered it during the time of ISIS to identify homegrown ISIS threats in 2014-2015."
The new version of this technology, he added, is openly targeting two groups: Those wary of potential adverse effects from the COVID-19 vaccine and those skeptical of recent U.S. election results.
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/ai-algorithm-used-track-terrorists-now-being-turned-us-citizens-fight