NewsGuard has established itself as a major force in the mass-censorship of online dissent, working with the U.S. Government, pharmaceutical companies and others to discredit and demonetise websites that question official information. Lee Fang at RealClear Investigations has taken a closer look at the shadowy outfit.
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.
How would the company determine the truth? For issues such as COVID-19, NewsGuard would steer readers to official government sources only, like the federal Centres for Disease Control. Other content-moderation allies, Crovitz’s pitch noted, include “intelligence and national security officials”, “reputation management providers” and “Government agencies”, which contract with the firm to identify misinformation trends. Instead of only fact-checking individual forms of incorrect information, NewsGuard, in its proposal, touted the ability to rate the “overall reliability of websites” and “’prebunk’ COVID-19 misinformation from hundreds of popular websites”.
NewsGuard’s ultimately unsuccessful pitch sheds light on one aspect of a growing effort by governments around the world to police speech ranging from genuine disinformation to dissent from officially sanctioned narratives. In the United States, as the Twitter Files revealed, the effort often takes the form of direct Government appeals to social media platforms and news outlets. More commonly the Government works through seemingly benign non-governmental organisations – such as the Stanford Internet Observatory – to quell speech it disapproves of.
Or it pays to coerce speech through Government contracts with outfits such as NewsGuard, a for-profit company of especially wide influence. Founded in 2018 by Crovitz and his co-CEO Steven Brill, a lawyer, journalist and entrepreneur, NewsGuard seeks to monetise the work of reshaping the internet. The potential market for such speech policing, NewsGuard’s pitch to Twitter noted, was $1.74 billion, an industry it hoped to capture.
Instead of merely suggesting rebuttals to untrustworthy information, as many other existing anti-misinformation groups provide, NewsGuard has built a business model out of broad labels that classify entire news sites as safe or untrustworthy, using an individual grading system producing what it calls “nutrition labels”. The ratings – which appear next to a website’s name on the Microsoft Edge browser and other systems that deploy the plug-in – use a scale of zero to 100 based on what NewsGuard calls “nine apolitical criteria”, including “gathers and presents information responsibly” (worth 18 points), “avoids deceptive headlines” (10 points) and “does not repeatedly publish false or egregiously misleading content” (22 points).
Critics note that such ratings are entirely subjective – the New York Times, for example, which repeatedly carried false and partisan information from anonymous sources during the Russiagate hoax, gets a 100% rating. RealClear Investigations, which took heat in 2019 for unmasking the “whistleblower” of the first Trump impeachment (while many outlets including the Times still have not done so), has an 80% rating. (Verbatim: the NewsGuard-RCI exchange over the whistleblower.) Independent news outlets with an anti-establishment bent receive particularly low ratings from NewsGuard, such as the libertarian news site Antiwar.com, with a 49.5% rating, and conservative site the Federalist, with a 12.5% rating.
Very much worth reading in full – NewsGuard’s baseless targeting of the Daily Sceptic for questioning lockdowns is featured as a case study further down.
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“One possible argument for the hasty production of reviews is that there was an emergency, and we needed something, anything, to direct decisions”
How is that when the only virus was the media!
“One possible argument for the hasty production of reviews is that there was an emergency, and we needed something, anything, to direct decisions. “
Grandma’s dictum: decide in haste, repent at leisure.
Two things medics are often taught:
Don’t just do something! Stand there.
50% of what we teach you will turn out to be wrong. Trouble is we don’t know which 50%.
and from the military:
Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.
The actual decisions during ‘Covid’ were more:
We must be seen to be doing something! Whaddayagot?
It’s the same with NET Zero, twenty years on.
As the chair of a political committee might say: “Something must be done. This is something, so lets do it”.
Here is an extract from Factfullness by Hans Rosling and the dangers of the Urgency Instinct. What’s the relevance? It’s about saving lives again and the law of unintended consequences.
Chapter 10 – The Urgency Instinct
“If it’s not contagious, then why did you evacuate your children and wife?” asked the mayor of Nacala, eyeing me from a safe distance behind his desk. Out the window, a breathtaking sun was setting over Nacala district and its population of hundreds of thousands of extremely poor people, served by just one doctor – me.
Earlier in the day I had arrived back in the city from a poor coastal area in the north named Memba. There I had spent two days using my hands to diagnose hundreds of patients with a terrible, unexplained disease that had completely paralyzed their legs within minutes of onset and, in severe cases, made them blind. And the mayor was right; I wasn’t 100% sure it was not contagious. I hadn’t slept the previous night but had stayed up, pouring over my medical textbook, until I had finally concluded that the symptoms I was seeing had not been described before. I’d guessed this was some kind of poison rather than anything infectious, but I couldn’t be sure, and I had asked my wife to take our young children and leave the district.
Before I could figure out what to say, the mayor said, “If you think it could be contagious, I must do something. To avoid a catastrophe, I must stop the disease from reaching the city.”
The worst-case scenario had already unfolded in the mayor’s mind, and immediately spread to mine.
The mayor was a man of action. He stood up and said, “Should I tell the military to set up a roadblock and stop the buses from the north?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think it’s a good idea. You have to do something.”
The mayor disappeared to make some calls.
When the sun rose over Memba the next morning, some 20 women and their youngest children were already up, waiting for the morning bus to take them to the market in Nacala to sell their goods. When they learned the bus had been cancelled, they walked down to the beach and asked the fishermen to take them by the sea route instead. The fishermen made room for everyone in their small boats, probably happy to be making the easiest money of their lives as they sailed south along the coast.
Nobody could swim and when the boats capsized in the waves, all the mothers and children and fishermen drowned.
That afternoon I headed north again, past the roadblock, to continue to investigate the strange disease. As I drove through Memba I came across a group of people lining up on the roadside dead bodies they had pulled out of the sea. I ran down to the beach but it was too late. I asked a man carrying the body of a young boy, “Why were all these children and mothers out in those fragile boats?”
“There was no bus this morning.” he said. Several minutes later I could not still barely understand what I had done. Still today I can’t forgive myself. Why did I have to say to the mayor, “You must do something”?
I couldn’t blame these tragic deaths on the fisherman. Desperate people who need to get to market of course take the boat when the city authorities for some reason block the road.
I have no way to tell you how I carried on with the work I had to do that day and in the days afterward. And I didn’t talk about this to anyone else for 35 years.
Fourteen years later, in 1995, the ministers in Kinshasa, the capital of DR Congo, heard that there was an Ebola outbreak in the city of Kitwik. They got scared. They felt they had to do something. They set up a roadblock. Again, there were unintended consequences. Feeding the people in the capital became a major problem because the rural area that had always supplied most of their processed cassava was on the other side of the disease-stricken area. The city was hungry and started buying all it could from it’s second largest food producing area. Prices skyrocketed, and guess what? A mysterious outbreak of paralyzed legs and blindness followed.
Nineteen years after that, in 2014, there was an outbreak of Ebola in the rural north of Liberia. Inexperienced people from rich countries got scared and they all came up with the same idea: a roadblock!
…(continued)…
…At the Ministry of Health, I encountered politicians of a higher quality. They were more experienced, and their experience made them cautious. Their main concern was that roadblocks would destroy the trust of the people abandoned behind them. This would have been absolutely catastrophic: Ebola outbreaks are defeated by contact tracers, who depend on people honestly disclosing everybody they have touched. These heroes were sitting in poor slum dwellings carefully interviewing people who had just lost a family member about every individual their loved one might have infected before dying. Often, of course, the person being interviewed was on that list and potentially infected. Despite the constant fear and wave after wave of rumours, there was no room for drastic, panicky action. The infection path could not be traced with brute force, just patient, calm, meticulous work. One single individually delicately leaving out information about his dead brother’s multiple lovers could cost a thousand lives.
When we are afraid and under time pressure and thinking of worst-case scenarios, we tend to make really stupid decisions. Our ability to think analytically can be overwhelmed my an urge to make quick decisions and take immediate action.
Back in Nacala in 1981, I spent several days carefully investigating the disease but less than a minute thinking about the consequences of closing the road. Urgency, fear and a single-minded focus on the risks of a pandemic shut down my ability to think things through. In the rush to do something, I did something terrible.