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EXCLUSIVE – A law firm requested public records from five major universities in order to investigate whether they were participating in a “censorship regime” they claim was conducted under the Biden administration.
“Free speech is essential to a free society,” said Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Phil Sechler, director of the ADF Center for Free Speech, in a press release obtained by Fox News Digital.
“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,” Sechler said in the statement.
Now with a new administration in power, ADF is going after the University of Michigan (UM), the University of Wisconsin (UW), Indiana University (IU), the University of North Carolina (UNC), and the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA).
President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
ADF cited President Donald Trump signing an executive order that seeks to restore freedom of speech. Trump on Jan. 20 announced that the executive order ends the previous administration’s practices of trampling “free speech rights.”
The White House said the federal government will not censor speech on social media or any online platform in general, which they said was executed “under the guise of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.’”
ADF claims that these universities created “misinformation” centers that are “designed to censor speech.”
For example, ADF called out UM’s Center for Social Media Responsibility (CSMR), which, according to their website, “addresses the negative effects of broad access to the means of public communication, while amplifying positive effects.”
CSMR’s website explains further that while social media product managers, designers, and engineers “are the day-to-day policymakers of today’s social media landscape,” the institution aims to help them articulate “principles” as well as create “metrics and tools” that help them “set responsible policy.”
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The Alliance Defending Freedom law firm wants records related to universities communicating with social media companies and the National Science Foundation, including the University of Michigan. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)
The law firm wants records related to the CSMR containing any communication between the CSMR administrators, including the director, and federal government officials or employees. Furthermore, ADF requests documents related to communication between CSMR directors and employees of social media companies Google, Facebook, Instagram, “Twitter,” YouTube, Snapchat, and Reddit.
Acquiring such communication would help ADF identify any “certain censorship red flags,” in its view, like “cancel,” “throttle,” “First Amendment,” and “free speech.”
ADF also cited a report released in February by investigators from the U.S. House Judiciary Committee which found that UM officials pitched an idea of an artificial intelligence tool to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for “externalizing the difficult responsibility of censorship.”
The House Judiciary Commitee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government stated in February last year that NSF issued “multi-million-dollar grants to university and non-profit research teams” to combat “alleged misinformation” regarding COVID-19 and the 2020 election.
Considering that NSF “is responsible for funding censorship grants,” ADF wants records containing any of the terms National Science Foundation and NSF.
ADF suspects that CSMR and similar institutions at IU, UW, UNC, and UCLA had worked with the Biden administration.
Former President Joe Biden. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Sechler claimed that the Biden administration “established a censorship regime that aimed to suppress so-called ‘misinformation’ and other speech deemed unfavorable to the government,” which “included funding censorship tools created by these public universities.”
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“The U.S. government should defend our First Amendment right to free speech, not be its greatest threat,” he said.
UM, IU, UW, UNC, and UCLA, as well as a spokesperson for former President Joe Biden, did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Fox News Digital.
