A lot has been said about how the outgoing US administration’s focus on censorship (“combating misinformation“); it negatively affected online speech and now a number of federal spending documents examined by a non-profit show the price of that effort – or at least a part of it.
A new report prepared by OpenTheBooks details the grants the Biden-Harris administration started giving out as it took over in early 2021, and this doesn’t include the taxpayer money spent internally, by various departments and agencies.
The grants figure comes to $267 million – a massive increase (44 times more) compared to the $6.7 million that Trump’s first administration set aside for the same purpose.
The grants went toward researching what the outgoing White House chose to consider misinformation, which in many cases resulted in third parties – organization, academia, etc., – promoting and/or censoring speech, opponents of the practice say, effectively (and unconstitutionally) – as government proxies.
