NewsGuard is a company that rates websites on their truthfulness and then lets its clients know if they should be advertising there, i.e. if they could possibly be associated with sketchy information.
In other words, NewsGuard gets paid to play internet hall monitor with the power to bankrupt sites it does not like. It is literally a censorship-based business model that combines government and private sector clients and contacts in order to thrive.
NewsGuard claims to be fighting misinformation but that is a false canard of a red herring of a distraction to bolster the theoretical basis for the censorship of everything online. And if censorship did not exist, neither would NewsGuard.
While claiming to be accurate and impartial and objective and apolitical in its rankings of websites, NewsGuard is none of these things. The New York Times of Russia collusion hoax fame gets a 100% truthful rating, something that if the rating system was impartial would be literally impossible because it, knowingly or unknowingly (wink), spread lies. For years.
RealClear Investigations – part of the studiously even-handed RealClear family of sites like RealClear Politics – gets an 80%. CBS gets a top grade, Tucker Carlson near the bottom.
While it may seem NewsGuard targets only the right, that would be incorrect. NewsGuard targets anyone that strays from the globalist deep state path. True, at this time most of those sites are right of center (didn’t progressives used to love free speech? Wonder what happened…) but NewsGuard is an equal opportunity enforcer of the narrative of the moment.
Take Consortium News, an antiwar site that NewsGuard excoriated recently. The site is fighting back with a lawsuit, a lawsuit that mentions what must be the extreme coincidence of NewsGuard getting paid by the Department of Defense and their poor ranking.
As an aside, this is very similar to what the unconscionable Center for Countering Digital Hate is doing to Elon Musk’s X – force shaming companies to not advertise based on their own actual misinformation, or what used to be called lies.
But one thing that must be said in NewsGuard’s favor is that they do not merely lurk in the background with their deep state/deep money friends.
Thursday, CEO Steven Brill published an op-ed in Politico – the go to for the gotten to - on exactly how the internet can be properly censored without Congress having to get involved at all.
The framing of the piece is rather fascinating – Brill argues that all social media companies have to do is really really enforce their “terms of service.” The government would just make sure they really really did – hey, maybe that could be outsourced to a company like NewsGuard, kinda like so much is now to colleges, etc. – what a coincidence.
We shall put aside for the moment the fact that, while, yes, people agree to them, no one reads terms of service agreements. Also, that, when it comes to “misinformation” – which does not exist anyway - said terms are exceedingly vague and malleable.
Brill makes a bold claim, that “we can make the internet a more peaceful, reliable, less polarizing place…And we can do it without the government policing speech.”
The funny thing is, about three sentences later – in the same paragraph even – Brill says the following:
In fact, Congress does not have to do anything. It doesn’t even need to touch Section 230, the now infamous 1996 law that gives social media platforms immunity for the harmful content — from healthcare hoaxes to election misinformation to Russian and Chinese state-sponsored propaganda — that has created a world of chaos and division, where so many people don’t believe even the most basic truths. Instead, the Federal Trade Commission and other consumer protection regulators around the world could enforce the contracts the platforms already have with their users.
I’ll have to check my old “Schoolhouse Rock” videos but I’m pretty sure the FTC is part of the Government and that the First Amendment applies to things the entire government – including “Congress” - does.
In large part, Brill’s entire piece is an advertisement for NewsGuard.
For the full effect of Brill’s only-approved knowledge may be disseminated worldview, it’s important to note the whipsaw pivots from “the government can’t do that” to something very very different.
Spelling out those terms prominently and clearly would mean posting a large chart on a prominent screen listing all possible offending content and requiring the platform to check a box if the content is prohibited or allowed.
In keeping with First Amendment restrictions on government regulation of the content of speech, it would be up to the platforms to decide which content to prohibit — that is, to check or not check each box. A platform that wants to allow misinformation or hate speech could choose to do so. However, it would have to level with its users in that prominent chart by declaring that it is choosing to allow it. This would give a stricter platform a competitive advantage in the marketplace; a platform that has to declare in large print that it allows misinformation or hate speech is likely to turn off many potential users and advertisers.
First Amendment protections would prohibit the government from forcing the platforms to prohibit hate speech or most misinformation. Yet nothing stops the proprietors of a platform from making those decisions by defining what it considers hate speech or harmful misinformation and screening it out.
The FTC has the regulatory authority to proceed on its own without Congress to enforce the platforms’ own contractual promises.
Disconcertingly, Brill’s “proposal” is essentially what government lawyers are saying in response to the Murthy v. Missouri case in front of the United States Supreme Court right at this very moment.
The extremely credible allegations – see the Twitter Files – are simple: that the government directly and indirectly through private companies and academic efforts, like the Stanford Virality Project, squashed free speech and the free expression of ideas regarding covid and the 2020 election in direct violation of the Frist Amendment of the constitution.
The government’s response? No, no – they’re all private companies and we just asked them nicely like anyone else could do to enforce their terms of service and never once mentioned the fact that we could regulate them out of business or chatted with the surprisingly large number of former government intelligence workers who now stalk the halls of every social media outfit.
In other words – “That’s a nice gargantuan world-bestriding monopoly you have there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.”
The difference between Brill’s suggestion and what is exactly happening now is to move it from the archipelago of evil that runs from Homeland Security to the FBI to the CIA and hand it over – all above-board like - to the Federal Trade Commission.
Because they can do it legally.
One must admire Brill’s moxie – there are few people who would publicly tell the government how to legally do what it is currently illegally doing.
Besides being stunningly oppressive and antithetical to the very core of what it means to be an American, Brill’s idea is most likely not that much more “legal” than what is happening now. It is still government interfering with speech in one medium that it could not do if it were occurring another way. For example, the government cannot tell a newspaper to run a letter to the editor by Joe Schmoe.
But if the government tells a company like, oh, I don’t know, say NewsGuard, to have a chat with the newspapers’ few remaining advertisers about trust and possible terms of service violations and such and then the advertiser threatens to never place another ad, well that’s a different story.
That’s what is happening now and no amount of round peg/square hole op-eds are going to be able to justify censorship or make it constitutional.
Fun fact: Brill has a book coming out in June called “The Death of Truth.”
Et tu, Brute?