Today, liber-net is launching a searchable database of almost 900 US federal government awards to counter mis-, dis-, and malinformation (MDM) and other content moderation initiatives, covering the period from 2010 to 2025.
We gave the Free Press a preview, and today Gabe Kaminsky and Madeleine Rowley published a story based on the database, focusing on the more than 600 awards made under the Biden administration, though our data show the “anti-disinformation” industry really took off under Trump 1.0 and then accelerated radically under Biden.
The Free Press spoke with more than a dozen government agencies for that story and noted that “since then, federal officials have terminated at least several dozen programs related to misinformation and disinformation, according to documents and interviews.”
Since October of 2024, liber-net has been researching federal MDM funding to inform a set of policy proposals for how the US government-funded wing of the Censorship-Industrial Complex might be dismantled. Ours was a rod-and-spear-style approach to fishing out the censors to identify who exactly was funding what. That method was quickly superseded by DOGE-style dynamite fishing. February in particular saw a massive USAID pile-on that over-inflated the agency’s role in the Complex, as important as the USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) was.
After reviewing almost 1,100 awards, we included almost 900 in the database. The total value of those awards is roughly 1.5 billion U.S. dollars. …
Many interesting charts and graphs found in this section. …
In the future, we plan to look into EU, private foundation, and other government money to see just how they all stack up. This is particularly important as “anti-disinformation” leaders seek to rebuild these programs from an EU/UK base.
Next week we’ll release a number of other visualisations that focus on where the money went – regions, countries, activities, topics, and more.
Lastly, if you are an academic and are interested in working with this data to produce a research paper, please reach out. In a sane world, there would be journals out there that would love a critical meta-analysis of the sector. The anti-disinformation and internet studies sector’s wagons, however, remain circled, increasingly so with the current blunt crackdown on universities. The lesson of how we got to this point is being lost in this new struggle, but must be learned to avoid repeating the same mistakes.
With thanks to the liber-net team.
The best disinfectant is light!! I am very happy to see that the spotlight is being shined on the whole miserable censorship enterprise of the USA and EU and UK because they need it very badly. It will, of course, scatter the cockroaches infesting all the darker areas of the states involved, but is that a bad thing? They are also giving the specifics of the censorship grants, like to whom and what organizations, so we will find out if we look, won’t we?