Federal Funds Used to Research ‘Hate Speech’ on Gab – IOTW Report

Federal Funds Used to Research ‘Hate Speech’ on Gab

Breitbart: Researchers at USC used federal funds to compile a “corpus” of “hate speech” on Gab, the First Amendment-friendly social media network that provides an alternative to increasingly censorious platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Titled “The Gab Hate Corpus: A collection of 27k posts annotated for hate speech,” the project involved over a dozen researchers and was sponsored by funds from the National Science Foundation, a federal body that distributes taxpayer money to fund scientific research, including “social sciences.”

The current NSF director is an Obama appointee, France A. Córdova. The NSF’s budget in 2020 was increased by 2.5 percent on the previous year, to $8.28 billion. Part of that taxpayer money, it seems, is now going to study “hate speech” on Gab.

“The growing prominence of online hate speech is a threat to a safe and just society,” declares the study. “This endangering phenomenon requires collaboration across the sciences in order to generate evidence-based knowledge of, and policies for, the dissemination of hatred in online spaces.”

The report also claims to “establish baseline classification performance for each using standard natural language processing methods.” Natural language processing is a subfield of linguistics, AI and computer science that among other things involves training AIs how to recognize and analyze human speech.

In a statement, Gab slammed the researchers for “cherrypicking” items of speech from its website. read more

11 Comments on Federal Funds Used to Research ‘Hate Speech’ on Gab

  1. The current NSF director is an Obama appointee, France A. Córdova.
    No more info needed,,
    I’ll just wait for the news that Trump cancelled the funding.

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  2. How do we stop the fascists in our govt from using our own money against us? How is this even constitutional?

    We need to start a campaign to get rid of this agency!!

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  3. I wonder if there is an audit group in the NSF that reviews these grants especially the social science ones. In any event it’s time to have an outside authority review Mr. Cordova’s performance and if necessary thank him for his service and blow him out the door. I’ll bet there are a number of projects being funded by the social science NSF that wouldn’t pass the smell test.

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  4. Thirdtwin, you nearly took the words out of my mouth.

    Any time the word “science” is preceded by the word “social,” yeah, you’ve just lost my interest.

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