Lisa Fazio expected her National Science Foundation grant to be cancelled. The associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University had watched, with apprehension, the GOP targeting disinformation in a series of legislative attacks.
She only grew more certain when, on April 18, the National Science Foundation (NSF) put out a statement on how grants would henceforth be evaluated for funding. In addition to limiting the inclusion of underrepresented groups, the statement cited Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” to cut funding for disinformation research:
“NSF will not support research with the goal of combating “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation” that could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advances a preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”
Fazio knew her research—”How false beliefs form and how to correct them“—was toast. Building on the established understanding that the more times a given piece of information is repeated, the more likely people are to believe it—whether or not it’s true—Fazio’s research tested that idea outside the lab in studies based on social media and texting. The question, Fazio said, was, “How can we best design misinformation debunks and misinformation corrections so that they’re as effective as possible?”
She didn’t have to wait long for the news. Hours after the NSF statement was released, Fazio received an email about the termination of the roughly $500,000 grant funding her study. Despite expecting the news, Fazio described it as a “gut punch.”
Mary Feeney, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs, worked as a program officer at NSF under the Biden administration, overseeing its “Science of Science” program, which approved grants in fields like science communication and information quality. Feeney expressed confusion: none of the research she approved, she remarked, could reasonably be said to infringe on the constitutional right to free speech or debate. “No research project I ever recommended for funding, or that I’ve ever heard of, goes out and denies someone from speaking or doing a media report,” Feeney said.
“We know false information is out there, we know it spreads widely, and it’s important for people’s health and for democracy to understand what we can do about it.”
“The work that we’re doing is not censorship,” said Fazio. “We’re telling what the scientific community thinks about topics where there’s consensus on what we think is true or false, based on what we know. That’s not censorship. That’s adding additional speech to the conversation.”
Moreover, said Feeney, NSF doesn’t regulate anyone’s speech; it funds research that leads to “an advancement of knowledge, the delivery of courses, training for junior scientists.”
“I think it’s a big leap between ‘we fund research on X topic’ and ‘the results of that research prevent someone from doing something,’” she said.
But the cuts didn’t surprise her, either. In Feeney’s final year with NSF, she says, leadership asked her to remove the word “misinformation” from grant titles, replacing it with other terms. She believes that the Biden White House “sensed that misinformation was becoming a target word for the incoming administration, and they were trying to kind of move it out of the system.”
Regardless, more than 50 other NSF grants studying how information is disseminated and trusted—worth some $9 million—have been cancelled since Friday, when the body released its new guidelines. Most of those grants funded studies on disinformation.
Fazio is one of the lucky ones. Most of her grant had already been used, with several papers already published. She hopes to continue follow-up research on a smaller scale with private funding, although it’s harder to come by. “Since the federal government started attacking misinformation researchers, nonprofits and foundations have been less interested in funding this research than they were before,” she said.
But she worries about the impacts of the funding loss. Fazio’s next project was going to study the formation of false beliefs broadly—she offered the example of “how repeating false information about immigrants might affect your belief about immigration as a whole.” The loss of NSF funding may make that project impossible.
“We know false information is out there,” Fazio says, “We know it spreads widely, and it’s important for people’s health and for democracy to understand what we can do about it.”
NSF’s “Science of Science” program, Feeney explained, wasn’t just about spotting false narratives but making science more understandable. “Some of it was misinformation, but a lot of it is also trust,” she says. “Misinformation is one component of this broader understanding of science communication.”
The new NSF statement is “creating a false narrative about science in America,” said Fazio. “It’s misinformation [to say] that research on misinformation is actually censoring the general public.”
“The administration is complaining about the censorship while censoring academics and what we research,” she lamented.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.