Musk Lashes Out Against NewsGuard Censorship

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who also owns X, formerly known as Twitter, at an event during the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, on June 16, 2023. (Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images)

Entrepreneur Elon Musk has called the content moderator NewsGuard a “scam” and demanded that it be “disbanded immediately” over claims that it suppresses speech that doesn’t align with the moderator’s political stances. Mr. Musk also has questioned the European Union over its alleged association with NewsGuard.

On Oct. 19, Trump administration official Mike Benz wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter: “[NewsGuard] is knee deep in a plot to get [governments] to bankrupt alternative news. NewsGuard worked [with the] EU on new disinformation code. Its biz model has ‘disinformation compliance’ services [with the] censorship laws it promotes.”

The EU’s “2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation” calls on tech companies and ad firms to financially choke publishers identified as spreading content deemed to be “disinformation.” In response to Mr. Benz’s post, Mr. Musk said: “Is this true [Thierry Breton]? If so, the people of Europe deserve an explanation.” Mr. Breton is the European commissioner for the European Union’s Internal Market.

In an Oct. 19 post on X, Tim Pool, a political commentator and podcast host, revealed that NewsGuard gave his company a strike because it “ran 5 stories out of nearly 5,000 that quoted [former President Donald] Trump.”

“They claimed that reporting on Trump’s statements was irresponsible because we should be fact checking him instead and Trump was wrong. They now claim we [don’t] correct errors because we [didn’t] respond to their false claims last month,” he said.

Mr. Musk replied to the post: “What a scam! ‘Newsguard’ should be disbanded immediately.”

Founded in 2018, NewsGuard claims to rate online content for trustworthiness, insisting that it’s objective and nonpartisan.

However, an investigation from The Epoch Times in August showed that NewsGuard’s measure of media quality depended on whether content was in line with the organization’s opinions.

Mr. Musk has been facing increasing pressure from the EU regarding the moderation of X.

Musk Versus EU

The Tesla CEO has long been at odds with the European Union over the bloc’s content moderation policies.

After Mr. Musk took over the social media company in October 2022, Mr. Breton said that if the platform wants to do business in the bloc, it must operate by the bloc’s rules. He also suggested that Mr. Musk will have to “increase” the number of content moderators on the platform in the EU.

Thierry Breton, European commissioner for internal market, speaks during a signature ceremony regarding the Chips Act at EU headquarters in Brussels on Feb. 8, 2022. (Virginia Mayo/Pool via Reuters)

In mid-December 2022, new tensions emerged between X and the EU after the online platform suspended multiple journalists for allegedly violating its new policy on doxxing (i.e., the public revelation of personal information). Vera Jourova, a European Commission vice president, called the “arbitrary suspension” of the reporters “worrying.”

In February, the EU complained that X wasn’t taking the bloc’s fight against “disinformation” seriously as the platform produced an incomplete report on its compliance with EU rules on censorship. On Feb. 9, the EU said that X lagged behind Google, Meta, and TikTok in moderating “disinformation” over the previous six months.

“I am disappointed to see that Twitter’s report lags behind others, and I expect a more serious commitment to their obligations,” Ms. Jourova said at the time.

Unlike tech firms such as Google and Facebook, X has refused to take part in the EU’s voluntary anti-disinformation effort, the “2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation.”

During a press conference in September, Ms. Jourova called X “the platform with the largest ratio of mis- or disinformation posts.” She warned that the commission would be keeping an eye on the platform.

Mr. Musk reacted to the warning in a series of memes posted on X, including a post that made fun of other tech firms’ apparent eagerness to comply with the EU’s censorship laws.

This month, Mr. Breton accused X of not blocking posts related to the Israel–Hamas conflict, stating that groups are spreading misinformation and “violent and terrorist” content on the platform.

X CEO Linda Yaccarino pushed back, saying that the platform has removed hundreds of accounts linked to Hamas and taken down thousands of posts after the terror group’s attack on Israel.

NewsGuard Censorship

An investigation by The Epoch Times found that NewsGuard advanced its own biased opinions when fact-checking publishers.

There have been several instances in which publishers have come under pressure from NewsGuard for running stories on topics such as COVID-19 vaccines, pandemic restrictions, climate change, and the World Economic Forum that were counter to the views of the leftist establishment, the investigation found.

A NewsGuard rating on a PragerU article is displayed on a laptop in New York City on July 26, 2023. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Most of the outlets given low ratings by NewsGuarded tended to lean right-wing, it found.

Earlier, conservative education platform PragerU was given a red label by NewsGuard. The organization asked PragerU to stop criticizing COVID-19 lockdown policies and to not question the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.

“Part of their demands were basically dictating to us what kind of content we’re allowed and not allowed to share,” PragerU CEO Marissa Streit told PragerU founder Dennis Prager during an interview on his podcast.

NewsGuard has also received funding from the Biden administration. According to data from USASpending.gov, the Department of Defense (DOD) awarded NewsGuard $749,387 in 2021 for the organization’s “misinformation fingerprints” project.

The project tracks “disinformation campaigns with human intelligence and AI,” according to NewsGuard. It provides “a continuously updated view of the digital information environment—and a powerful way to track narratives that are emerging and spreading online.”

In a March 2022 report, the Media Research Center revealed that NewsGuard gave “perfect grades to outlets that tried to quash the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

“Left-wing news organizations Politico, The Washington Post, Axios and USA Today all maligned the Biden bombshell by the New York Post as possibly part of a 2020 ‘disinformation’ campaign,” it said.

“The New York Times finally authenticated the emails the liberal media tried to dismiss for months, but also tied the documents to an ongoing federal investigation. Despite this, NewsGuard rated the outlets with perfect 100/100 scores for ‘credibility.’”

In May 2022, Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) wrote a letter to the commander of the U.S. Cyber Command regarding the $749,387 grant given to NewsGuard.

“The Misinformation Fingerprints program allows A.I. and machine learning software to monitor and suppress stories and media outlets that NewsGuard has decided are false and unreliable,” he wrote.

“NewsGuard has an extreme partisan bias,” the letter read. “According to reporting from the Washington Free Beacon, NewsGuard’s staff overwhelmingly supports the Democrat Party: ‘Twenty NewsGuard executives and advisers have contributed to Democratic candidates since 2015, with only six giving to Republicans.’”

The DOD’s financial support for the “partisan suppression of political speech is an unacceptable and un-American abuse of taxpayer dollars,” according to Mr. Banks.