The Biden administration’s Department of Justice recently awarded an award to a South Carolina university. Nearly $1 million in grants to create a “disinformation” dashboard to help track “specific accounts” to prevent “violent extremism”; Daily Caller News Foundation report.
The Department of Justice will provide $953,203 in taxpayer funds to Clemson University to research “misinformation, misinformation, and malicious information,” which the grant description refers to as “MDM.” Investigating, reducing, and preventing MDM “has become a top priority for governments, private organizations, and researchers.”
“Nationally publicized political events often become a focus for MDM, with various individuals and groups launching disinformation campaigns and encouraging the spontaneous or crowdsourced spread of disinformation and violent extremism. and be exploited to cause harm,” the grant description states.
The approximately $1 million award will fund university projects aimed at answering several questions, including: “(1) What characteristics of high-profile events are likely to trigger online MDM campaigns? (2) What network patterns are associated with online MDM?” (3) MDM campaigns (4) What are the key themes and linguistic features of MDM campaigns, and how do they differ between propagators and adopters? (4) What are the key themes and linguistic features of MDM campaigns? Or? ”
After answering the above questions, the university team will be tasked with creating a “specialized algorithm to identify the creation of MDM campaigns.”
The project is described as conducting “the first real-time mapping of the spread of MDM campaigns around controversial public events.”
“In the first phase, the team will create an original event-level dataset that documents the real-time characteristics of political events that trigger MDM,” the grant description continues. “The second phase uses advanced computational tools to monitor MDM campaigns in near real-time and identify specific accounts/nodes associated with large donations.”
According to the description, the project will be used to “shape the response to MDM.” The study noted that the research would be “useful to policy makers, law enforcement officials, and even community stakeholders.” The university team will also be tasked with developing an “online dashboard with outreach materials and MDM trackers.”
“The dashboard provides a multi-level framework for understanding the determinants and characteristics of MDM prevalence and identifying associations between specific linguistic features and their virality. , provides insight into the commonalities and differences in the online behavior of MDM adopters, non-adopters, and disseminators,” the grant description concludes.
Taxpayer funding is awarded to the university through the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice Research, Evaluation, and Development Projects Grant. The grant program is intended to “foster the development of new knowledge and tools that can be applied to reduce crime and promote justice, especially at the state and local level.”
Neither the Department of Justice nor Clemson University responded to requests for comment from DCNF.
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