The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has new priorities, and while some might call them great priorities – tremendous priorities, even, the best priorities in the world – they do not include research on deepfakes.
Updated guidance on the NSF website reflects a recent Executive Order from the White House, ostensibly aimed at “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” Its argument leans heavily on the First Amendment, and the attendant belief that “government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”
According to the EO, “the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.”
The Trump government’s current quest to restore free speech to America has also included banning books by Pulitzer prize-winning authors, scrubbing the history of slavery in the States, seizing control of one of its most respected arts institutions, and barring the Associated Press from briefings when it refused to use Trump’s preferred geographical term for the Gulf of Mexico.
