The Trump administration has sharply expanded its campaign against experts who track misinformation and other harmful content online, abruptly canceling scores of scientific research grants at universities across the country.
The grants funded research into topics like ways to evade censors in China. One grant at the Rochester Institute of Technology, for example, sought to design a tool to detect fabricated videos or photos generated by artificial intelligence. Another, at Kent State University in Ohio, studied how malign actors posing as ordinary users manipulate information on social media.
Officials at the Pentagon, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation contend that the research has resulted in the censorship of conservative Americans online, though there is no evidence any of the studies resulted in that.
The campaign stems from an executive order that President Trump issued on Jan. 20 vowing to protect the First Amendment right to free speech, but the scale of it has prompted criticism that it is targeting anyone researching misinformation. The intent, the critics have said, is in fact to stifle findings about the noxious content that is increasingly polluting social media and political discourse.
“When you ask Americans, these are things they’re really concerned about,” said Lisa K. Fazio, an associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University, whose grant to study how the repetition of lies reinforced them was among those canceled. “They want to know what can be done.”
The cuts are part of the administration’s broader push to cut federal spending, but they also reflect a conviction among conservatives that the government used researchers at universities and nongovernmental organizations as proxies to restrict content on Facebook, X, YouTube and other social media platforms.
The researchers say those claims conflate academic study about the spread of misinformation or disinformation with decisions made by tech giants to enforce their own policies against certain kinds of content, as they did when they suspended the accounts of President Trump and others involved in inciting violence on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021.
With Mr. Trump back in power, the claim of widespread government censorship has animated policy decisions across the federal government — from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which shuttered its unit tracking foreign influence operations, to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which faces a $491 million budget cut in programs that addressed election misinformation or foreign propaganda.
Last month, the National Science Foundation, a government agency that finances much of the scientific research in the United States, began canceling hundreds of grants. Most focused on studies involving issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, but scores singled out work on online content.
The cancellation has jeopardized research in universities in virtually every state, leaving researchers scrambling to find funding for projects that in many cases are only partly completed.
Each Friday since then, the foundation has announced new cancellations. It has now cut more than 1,400 grants, including 75 more last Friday. In all, the grants were worth more than $1 billion, according to a list compiled by two researchers, Scott W. Delaney, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health, and Noam Ross, the executive director of rOpenSci, a nonprofit software foundation. None of the grant abstracts reviewed by The New York Times called for censoring content.
“That’s really not the nature of our research,” said Marshall Van Alstyne, an economist at Boston University, referring to censorship. His team lost a grant for research on ways to encourage social media users to verify the sources of their posts to incentivize accuracy.
The National Science Foundation declined to respond to questions but posted a series of statements on its website saying that among other things it would “not support research with the goal of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation’ that could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens.” (Malinformation refers to content that could be true but is manipulated to change its context. A common example cited is revenge pornography.)
Many of the cuts seemed arbitrary, even by the administration’s stated justification.
Eric Wustrow, a computer engineer at the University of Colorado Boulder, studied ways to sidestep censorship — in China, not the United States. “It’s possible that maybe they saw the word censorship and thought that it couldn’t mean anything but censoring them,” he said, referring to Republican officials.
The foundation’s notifications claimed that the cancellations could not be appealed, though its policies stated otherwise.
“Even though they haven’t been following their own procedures guide, I’m doing my best to follow the guidance that has been laid out in prior procedures,” said Marianna Zhang, a postdoctoral fellow at New York University, whose grant to study the way children adopt cultural stereotypes at a young age was canceled.
The cuts have also angered Democrats on Capitol Hill. Last week, a dozen members of the House wrote the foundation’s new acting director, Brian Stone, saying the administration was “unparalleled in its hostility to American science.”
The National Institutes of Health also canceled at least a dozen projects specifically involving misinformation or conspiracy theories, including ones that examined how they undercut treatments for cancer, the human papillomavirus, H.I.V. and Covid-19.
The agency did not answer written questions about the cuts, but in a statement referred to the slogan popularized by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the health secretary: Make America Healthy Again. “N.I.H. is carefully reviewing all grants to assure N.I.H. is addressing the United States chronic disease epidemic,” the statement said.
The Pentagon, meantime, has slashed funding for the Minerva Research Initiative, a program started in 2008 to support social science research in areas that could have an impact on national security in global hot spots.
One study, completed last year by two researchers at the University of Tennessee, Catherine Luther and Brandon Prins, documented how Russia stoked anti-American sentiment in international media before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Even before the cancellations of the grants, the field of researchers examining harmful content online had been under attack from Republicans in Congress and lawsuits in courts.
The social media giants that once supported the work — especially Facebook and Twitter, before it became X under Elon Musk — have also backed away from efforts to moderate what users see on their platforms. Without government support, research into the ills that inflict the internet will wither.
“I’m almost certain,” Dr. Van Alstyne said, “this is going to lead to a vastly more polluted information environment.”
Steven Lee Myers covers misinformation and disinformation from San Francisco. Since joining The Times in 1989, he has reported from around the world, including Moscow, Baghdad, Beijing and Seoul.
The post Trump Administration Cancels Scores of Grants to Study Online Misinformation appeared first on New York Times.
