Tell Congress to stop NewsGuard’s Orwellian censorship: Send a message today
(LifeSiteNews) — The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wrote a letter to the CEOs of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple on Wednesday demanding that they disclose the extent of their use of the “Orwellian” news rating organization NewsGuard.
“Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft & others have played central roles in the censorship cartel,” FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote on X in a post showing his letter to the Big Tech companies.
Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft & others have played central roles in the censorship cartel.
The Orwellian named NewsGuard along with “fact checking” groups & ad agencies helped enforce one-sided narratives.
The censorship cartel must be dismantled. pic.twitter.com/Xf0sEYOUfv
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) November 15, 2024
Carr pointed to the “Orwellian named NewsGuard” as a censorship culprit, along with so-called “‘fact checking’ groups & ad agencies” which promoted “one-sided narratives.” He concluded, “The censorship cartel must be dismantled.”
In his letter to the Big Tech CEOs, he called out their companies for their role in a recent “unprecedented surge in censorship,” writing:
Big Tech companies silenced Americans for doing nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights. They targeted core political, religious and scientific speech. And they worked — often in concert with so-called ‘media monitors’ and others — to defund, demonetize, and otherwise put out of business news outlets and organizations that dared to deviate from an approved narrative.
Carr called out Big Tech for collaborating with “so-called fact checking” groups such as NewsGuard as well as with the Biden-Harris administration in an effort to block or suppress websites and social media posts or demonize them as “untrustworthy.”
“This censorship cartel is an affront to Americans’ constitutional freedoms and must be completely dismantled … Indeed, our democracy depends on freedom of expression,” Carr wrote.
According to Carr, Big Tech’s work with NewsGuard in particular calls into question a condition of their legal “liability shield,” which allows them to restrict access to “objectionable” material — that condition being that they are operating in “good faith.”
NewsGuard rates media outlets for what it deems “reliability” and “transparency,” and presents itself as the “internet’s arbiter of truth,” with its co-founder even calling it a “vaccine against misinformation,” as Carr noted. Once it does this, it effectively promotes or suppresses news media outlets by “leveraging its partnerships” with ad agencies, to whom it signals that certain outlets are “unsafe” to advertise on.
As one example of its attempted interference with free speech, the conservative media organization PragerU has told The Epoch Times that it was asked by NewsGuard “to stop criticizing the COVID-19 lockdown policies, stop questioning the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, and “stop talking about any COVID-19 treatments not endorsed by the government” as a condition of having its red label lifted.
Internet web browsers such as Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari, and Microsoft’s Bing use NewsGuard, as do social media companies, making the “credibility” group effectively built in to internet users’ experience. NewsGuard is also pitched for use by entire institutions, such as schools and libraries, triggering an alert when a user comes across a badly rated site that warns, “Proceed with caution. This website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.”
Carr argued that “NewsGuard’s own track record undermines the claim of “good faith actions” by those who utilize it, citing the fact that it has “consistently rated official propaganda from the Communist Party of China as more credible than American publications,” and that it “aggressively fact checked and penalized websites that reported on the COVID-19 lab leak theory.”
In fact, NewsGuard was forced to backtrack after making overconfident claims during the COVID-19 outbreak that the idea the virus was leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China was false, as The Epoch Times has pointed out.
As a result, “if a news outlet with a perfect score responsibly reported on the extensive circumstantial evidence indicating a lab leak, it ran the risk of NewsGuard decimating its score and falsely labeling it an ‘unreliable’ source,” The Epoch Times noted.
NewsGuard has also maintained misleading “fact-checks” of claims surrounding COVID-19 mRNA shots. For example, it described as a “myth” the claim that “A document on the FDA website shows that two participants died as a result of ‘serious adverse events’ from an experimental COVID-19 vaccine.” Yet, a Pfizer document was released in April 2023 reporting that two babies died from premature delivery after their mothers were injected with the Pfizer COVID jab during a trial phase, describing the premature deliveries as “adverse events.”
Moreover, “multiple Media Research Center studies detail numerous instances where NewsGuard apparently does not apply its own rating system in an even-handed manner,” Carr wrote in his letter to Big Tech CEOs. He also noted that, remarkably, NewsGuard is being investigated by the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability “for its impact on protected First Amendment speech.”
Carr is demanding that the CEOs of four of the biggest of Big Tech companies provide him with a “list” of all of their products or services that use NewsGuard or enable their users/customers to use NewsGuard by the deadline of December 10.
Carr looks forward to the complete transition of presidential and congressional leadership after the 2024 U.S. elections when, according to the FCC commissioner, “the FCC will have an important role to play reining in Big Tech, ensuring that broadcasters operate in the public interest, and unleashing economic growth while advancing our national security interests.”
Tell Congress to stop NewsGuard’s Orwellian censorship: Send a message today