This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Five major American universities are being called on to release information about their part in Joe Biden's "censorship regime."
The Alliance Defending Freedom said it has sent public records requests to the University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, the University of North Carolina and the University of California-Los Angeles.
Those institutions have created "misinformation" centers, or tools intended to single out and target speech that the federal government disfavors.
While President Donald Trump has signed executive orders halting federal government censorship efforts, those campaigns were in full force during the administration of Joe Biden, who actually embedded censorship offices in multiple federal bureaucracies.
"Free speech is essential to a free society," explained ADF lawyer Phil Sechler.
"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," he said.
The Biden administration often pressured private organizations, especially social media corporations, to censor ideas Biden disliked. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, parent of Facebook, testified to Congress about the pressure Biden appointees put on his company, including that White House employees shouted and screamed at his employees to enforce their censorship demands.
The ADF is asking for records and communications with federal government officials, social media companies, and foundations responsible for granting funds to censorship schemes.
Sechler said the government should be defending First Amendment speech rights, not be "its greatest threat."
He said, "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."
Some of the university targets already have been linked to Biden's campaigns, as a report by the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government found that University of Michigan officials pitched the idea of an artificial intelligence tool called WiseDex to the National Science Foundation for "externalizing the difficult responsibility of censorship.'"
Fox News explained the censorship was operated under the guise of "'combating 'misinformation,' 'disinformation,' and 'malinformation.'"
The report said the goal of the requests is to identify "certain censorship red flags," like the words "cancel," "First Amendment" or "throttle" that could make pursuing details about the schemes faster.
