In the sultry days of summer 2020 as Donald Trump contemplated a second term, his aides engaged in a quiet conversation with members of the emerging digital media about an audacious idea.
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Two months after the for-profit business NewsGuard came under congressional investigation for whether its business relationships with domestic and foreign governments are tantamount to state-sponsored censorship, the self-described “only apolitical service rating news sources” is taking on new targets like the Olympics and a high-profile free-speech lawyer.
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NewsGuard, the far-left, self-appointed arbiter of internet truth, released a blog post criticizing Tucker Carlson for his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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French public and advertising giant Publicis Groupe — the lead funder of “disinformation watchdog” NewsGuard — has agreed to pay $350 million as part of a settlement with state attorneys general over the company’s role in America’s opioid crisis. “Today’s filings describe how Publicis’ work contributed to the crisis by…
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Mike Benz, the director of a nonprofit that advocates for free speech, is sounding the alarm on the European Union’s investigation into X, formerly known as Twitter, for what it claims are breakages of the multinational conglomerate’s hate speech laws.
Benz, an attorney and the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), says that the EU’s plan is to force X into implementing a mandatory “disinformation compliance” service like NewsGuard. Such products have been termed “middleware.”
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In May 2021, L. Gordon Crovitz, a media executive turned start-up investor, pitched Twitter executives on a powerful censorship tool.
In an exchange that came to light in the “Twitter Files” revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, touted his product, NewsGuard, as a “Vaccine Against Misinformation.” His written pitch highlighted a “separate product” – beyond an extension already on the Microsoft Edge browser – “for internal use by content-moderation teams.” Crovitz promised an out-of-the-box tool that would use artificial intelligence powered by NewsGuard algorithms to rapidly screen content based on hashtags and search terms the company associated with dangerous content.
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On Thursday, Twitter CEO and entrepreneur Elon Musk called for NewsGuard—a for-profit entity dedicated to countering what it calls misinformation—to be “disbanded.”
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An independent news outlet is suing the internet’s self-appointed arbiter of truth for what it calls slander.
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Foundation for Freedom Online Executive Director Mike Benz breaks down exactly how Big Tech, Big Government, and the Deep State are working together to impose speech restrictions on the people of the United States and across the globe.
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The founder of a nonprofit that advocates for freedom of speech on the internet is sounding the alarm on government weaponization of “middleware” companies, which he said are essentially shell organizations for government censorship.
“The reason that they call it competitive middleware is because they’re trying to create a competitive industry around middleware compliance to avoid any antitrust situations that could arise,” Mike Benz, the executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), told The Tennessee Star Tuesday.
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Self-appointed news media truth arbiter NewsGuard has not downgraded any mainstream press organization’s trust rating, despite several of those outlets labeling the now-infamous Hunter Biden laptop story “disinformation” just before the 2020 election.
The Washington Post, USA Today and Politico were among the outlets to dismiss the story as possible disinformation, according to the Media Research Center.
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After its CEO suggested the now-infamous Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian Russian disinformation, NewsGuard, the self-styled arbiter of internet truth, is not backing down.
“My personal opinion is there’s a high likelihood this story is a hoax, maybe even a hoax perpetrated by the Russians again,” NewsGuard CEO Steve Brill said on CNBC just before the 2020 presidential election.
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Liberal tech billionaire Reid Hoffman, a funder of numerous disinformation projects, is backing a new media venture launched Tuesday that seeks to combat disinformation, according to a report.
Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, joined ranks with financier George Soros to fund Good Information Inc., which will “fund and scale businesses that cut through eco chambers with fact-based information,” Axios reported.
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