Near the end of the Biden administration, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, were awarded a $683,000 federal grant to investigate how misinformation and disinformation on social media impact “vaccine acceptance among black and Latinx individuals.” UC Irvine said it would enroll “followers of known vaccine-hesitant influencers” and “develop a tool” to visualize its findings.
The award is among more than 800 federal grants and contracts since 2017, totaling more than $1.4 billion, to help curb speech considered by the U.S. government to be misinformation and disinformation. More than 600 were made during the years when Joe Biden was president.
