Posted on 11/15/2023 5:25:48 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
With government contracts and corporate backers, NewsGuard seeks to monetize the work of reshaping the internet.
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 Centers 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 organizations — such as the Stanford Internet Observatory — to quell speech it disapproves of.
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
making a market
like carbon credits
grime
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/newsguard
Private company. That’s handy.
Founded 5 years ago. Interesting timing.
Useful for arguing
Ministry of Truth..,....,......
LibGuard
Thank God for real investigative reporters like Lee, Matt, Bari, and Michael. Where are those civil libertarians I thought I knew?
They are so brainwashed by themselves they can’t even see how Orwellian this garbage is.
Its so objective government pays for it....
Do I need the /sarc...?
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
By the same people who told us the mRNA shots were safe and effective. That if we got the jab, we wouldn’t get Covid and couldn’t spread Covid.
In other words, the professional, pathological liars.
Orson, is that you again?
HamasGuard
DoD payola that doesn’t rise to a fraction of the amount of harm caused by AI developers censoring conservative information from machine learning and generative output.
that is the thing with democrats....
they set their hive-mind to doing something and even if told NO by We the People,
they find a work-a-round to get it done.
Republicans? Republicans? ...crickets
Do a search using either Google or Bing, and then the same search using DuckDuckGo....it is obvious that both Google and Bing are already censoring information.
So is Duck.
There is all kinds of content that is no longer reachable by the search engines. Just try finding the videos that show election numbers being changed in real time on national TV the night of the 2020 election.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.