NewsGuard Technologies was founded in 2018 by Steven Brill and L. Gordon Crovitz, who serve as co-CEOs. Investors include the Knight Foundation, Publicis, and former Reuters executive of Tom Glocer.
Its advisors include former officials such as Tom Ridge, former homeland security secretary, Richard Stengel, former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, Michael Hayden, former CIA director general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former NATO chief, as well as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
NewsGuard approved sites include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and BuzzFeed. Sites labeled as unreliable include InfoWars, the Daily Kos, Sputnik, RT, WikiLeaks, and Fox News.
“But perhaps the greatest danger is posed by NewsGuard’s extensive ties to the government. Internal documents I obtained through the “Twitter Files” show that the founders of NewsGuard privately pitched the firm to clients as a tool to engage in content moderation on an industrial scale, applying artificial intelligence to take down certain forms of speech.”
Be careful what you write online, comrade. You are being watched.