ADF presses five major universities for records on government censorship

 ADF seeks records on participation in the ‘censorship-industrial complex’

WASHINGTON – Alliance Defending Freedom sent public records requests Wednesday to five public universities relating to their participation in the “censorship-industrial complex,” the often interlocking and hidden network of public and private censors who sought to silence protected speech. ADF attorneys are seeking the universities’ records and communications with federal government officials, social media companies, and foundations responsible for granting funds to censorship efforts.

ADF sent requests to the University of Michigan; the University of Wisconsin; Indiana University; the University of North Carolina; and the University of California, Los Angeles. The universities have created “misinformation” centers or tools designed to identify speech that the federal government has disfavored. These requests come shortly after President Donald Trump signed executive orders halting federal government censorship efforts.

“Free speech is essential to a free society,” said ADF Senior Counsel Phil Sechler, director of the ADF Center for Free Speech. “The U.S. government should defend our First Amendment right to free speech, not be its greatest threat. But the Biden administration established a censorship regime that aimed to suppress so-called ‘misinformation’ and other speech deemed unfavorable to the government. This regime included funding censorship tools created by these public universities. The American people have a right to know if their tax dollars were used to suppress certain voices and how involved state actors were—and are—in social media censorship.”

ADF is requesting documents and communications that address certain censorship red flags like “cancel” and “throttle” as well as records relating to the National Science Foundation, which is responsible for funding censorship grants.

In a report by the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, investigators found, for example, that University of Michigan officials pitched the idea of an artificial intelligence tool called WiseDex to the NSF for “externalizing the difficult responsibility of censorship.”