At MIT, one researcher told NSF officials “broad swaths of the public cannot effectively sort truth from fiction online.”
The researcher specifically called out “military veterans, older adults, military families” and those in “rural and indigenous communities” as particularly vulnerable to believing misinformation.
At the University of Michigan, one researcher who received millions suggested one possible outcome of the research was outsourcing content “moderation” decisions from social media platforms to government officials.
“Our misinformation service helps policy makers at platforms who want to… push responsibility for difficult judgments to someone outside the company… by externalizing the difficult responsibility of censorship,” a researcher at the University of Michigan’ said in a pitch to the NSF.
Another researcher at University of Wisconsin-Madison who received funding said the team, “was specifically focused on… skepticism regarding the integrity of U.S. elections and hesitancy related to COVID-19 vaccines.”
The researchers point to certain groups like those that read “the Bible or the Constitution” as subject to misinformation.
“Because interviewees distrusted both journalists and academics, they drew on this practice to fact check how media outlets reported the news” — when in actuality they weren’t fully informing themselves, the researcher said in a message.
A researcher at University of Washington which received funding to create a similar tool under another program — the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program — wrote to an NSF official that countering disinformation is “inherently political” and is ultimately “censorship.”
It sounds like Track F is well-named.