The Biden administration has approved a $550,000 grant to create an AI model that would be used to rapidly detect “microaggressions” across social media.
According to government spending records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, researchers at the University of Washington were given the grant through President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to develop technologies that could be used to protect online users from “discriminatory language.”
Of the $550,000, $132,000 has already been paid, with the rest expected to be dispensed within the next five years.
The technology, according to the researchers, allows machine learning models to read through social media content to identify “implicit bias” and microaggressions.
According to the Cleveland Health Clinic, “the standard definition for microaggression is a verbal or nonverbal slight that impacts an individual who might identify as being from a marginalized or non-mainstream community.” These can be intentional or unintentional and are often rooted in implicit bias, which are attitudes and beliefs that exist outside of our conscious awareness and control. These beliefs can include assumptions about people based on stereotypes related to their ethnicity, age, gender, or race.
According to the Free Beacon, the person heading the program is Yulia Tsvetkov, the University of Washington’s computer science professor. Yulia is the co-author of a 2019 study titled “Finding Microaggressions in the Wild and another article that analyzed the “prominence of positivity in #BlackLivesMatter tweets” during the George Floyd riots.
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton called the research a “project to make it easier for their leftist allies to censor speech.”
Medical News Today lists three classifications of microaggressions: microassaults, microinsults, and microinvalidations.
A microassault occurs when a person intentionally behaves in a discriminatory way while not intending to be offensive. A microinsult is a comment or action that is unintentionally discriminatory, and a microinvalidation occurs when a person’s comment invalidates or undermines the experiences of a marginalized group.
Recently, a public school in Michigan spent 21 days teaching adults in the district how to be good “equity” allies and offering classes on white privilege, the gender spectrum and the microaggressions of meritocracy.
MI school district suggests joining BLM protests, warns calling US 'land of opportunity' is 'microaggression'https://t.co/8Vd9zgnWXz
@FPSInformation should lose all Federal and State funding.— Anna (@wolters_ann) December 22, 2021
The list of “microaggressions” to avoid included calling America “the land of opportunity.”
