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.
“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.
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.
Musk Versus EU
The Tesla CEO has long been at odds with the European Union over the bloc’s content moderation policies.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.”
“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.
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.
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.
Most of the outlets given low ratings by NewsGuarded tended to lean right-wing, it found.
“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.