The Biden administration funded a host of obscure censorship groups. Fact check: true.
Under President Joe Biden’s administration, the State Department and the National Science Foundation funneled millions to a motley assortment of censorship outfits. Though they masqueraded as independent fact-checkers, the organizations were paid by the government to silence other people’s speech. Below are just six examples of this broader effort.
1. Nelez
The United States Embassy in Prague, Czech Republic (also called Czechia) gave a $95,000 grant to censorship group Nelez, which works to cut off revenue to and deplatform Euroskeptical news sources, according to Deutsche Welle. The grant money was used both for censorship and for a “communication strategy,” to — in the words of Nelez founder Roman Cihalik — court “multi-national corporations” with the “resources to systematically nurture the reputation of their brands.”
Cihalik also boasted: “We also approach companies ourselves when we find their ads on websites that share disinformation. … They work with us on putting together a 'blacklist' of websites where they don’t want to advertise.”
2. Meedan
The National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Division of Acquisition & Cooperative Support gave censorship outfit Meedan $5,749,974 to create “minority led partnerships,” which would flag internet speech for censorship, supposedly to combat “hate, abuse, and misinformation.” This was made possible by the creation of “Track F” for NSF’s “Convergence Accelerator.”
3. The Metamorphosis Foundation
The United States Embassy in Skopje, North Macedonia awarded a $330,000 grant to the American legacy media entity International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), which has a long history of supporting censorship. The ICFJ then partnered with a “media literacy” outfit called the Metamorphosis Foundation (“media literacy” is a euphemism for censorship). The two censorship outfits together conducted three-day seminars on flagging so-called “mis/disinformation and fact-checking, and pre-bunking.”
ICFJ and Metamorphosis’s seminars relied heavily on infodemic theory, which posits that an overabundance of information is a disease which must be inoculated against.
4. The Unity & Transparency Initiative
Censorship with the Metamorphosis Foundation was not the only project IFCJ received taxpayer funds for. The United States Embassy in Conakry, Guinea gave it a $324,974 grant to create the ironically-titled “Unity & Transparency” initiative. The funds were expended on “media literacy” seminars that focused on how to flag supposed “disinformation.”
5. ICFJ Sri Lanka
As Sri Lanka descended into chaos due to COVID-19 restrictions and Western powers pushing Green New Deal lunacy upon it, the United States Embassy in Colombo paid $1 million to train more "fact checkers" to censor speech. The contract for “fact checkers” was gobbled up by ICFJ.
6. Friends of Europe
In 2024, the United States Embassy in Brussels awarded a grant to the European Union (E.U.)-funded Belgian activist group Friends of Europe. The grant was specifically meant to enable Friends of Europe to push “solutions” that would solve so-called “Russian propaganda and disinformation.”
Friends of Europe is an explicitly political organization, working directly with leftist European government officials that coerce American Big Tech platforms to censor speech. Friends of Europe also openly colluded with European governments and artificial intelligence (AI) developers to stifle speech and aggressively lobbied for an expansion of E.U.’s censorship law the Digital Services Act (DSA).
Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand they ban censorship outfits like Meedan and Friends of Europe from getting more federal funds. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold government and Big Tech accountable.
