FCC commissioner takes aim at Big Tech censorship cartel
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr is targeting four tech giants that are part of what he called a “censorship cartel” controlling public discourse.
Carr, who Trump recently tapped to be FCC chairman come January, sent letters on Wednesday to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
“Over the past few years, Americans have lived through an unprecedented surge in censorship,” Carr wrote. “Your companies played significant roles in this improper conduct. Big Tech companies silenced Americans for doing nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights. They targeted core political, religious, and scientific speech. And they worked — often in concert with so-called ‘media monitors’ and others — to defund, demonetize, and otherwise put out of business news outlets and organizations that dared to deviate from an approved narrative.”
As an example of such a media monitor, Carr cited NewsGuard, a company praised by CNN as “the Librarian of the Internet” and by its co-founder as a “vaccine against misinformation.”
NewsGuard is a for-profit company that bills itself as an organization dedicated to “fighting misinformation” in both mainstream and social media. It employs a team of journalists and editors who issue “trust scores” for news websites based on criteria that determine whether a site is “trustworthy.”
Once it declares which sites are trustworthy and which are to be labelled "unreliable," NewsGuard sells the lists to advertisers so those companies can steer clear of the poorly rated websites. Studies conducted since the organization’s founding in 2018 show that NewsGuard rates Right-leaning news sites 27 points lower on average than Left-leaning news outlets. The company has also rated Chinese state-owned propaganda news media more trustworthy than American sites.
Carr noted that NewsGuard, which is currently under investigation by House Republicans, integrates with products sold by the censorship cartel.
“NewsGuard also works with web browsers, including Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari, and Microsoft’s Bing. NewsGuard has partnered with social media companies. And it offers products for AI systems and app stores. In other words, your products may use NewsGuard or you may enable your customers to use NewsGuard,” he said.
One of the members of NewsGuard’s advisory board, Carr revealed, “signed the now infamous October 2020 letter from former intelligence community officials that flamed the false claim that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation — a letter that itself fueled a wave of censorship.”
The FCC commissioner also threatened the tech giants with the revocation of Section 230 of the Communications Act, which the FCC enforces. Section 230 is a “prized liability shield” that protects social media companies from being held liable for the content published on their platforms. It is contingent, however, on the companies’ “good faith” actions. If Section 230 were repealed, tech corporations could be held legally liable for user content.
Carr notified the companies they will be investigated under the Trump administration and concluded the letter by demanding documentation on any products affiliated with NewsGuard and information pertaining to any media monitors the tech giants have used.
By the government and for the government
NewsGuard has received nearly $1 million from the US government, mostly from the Department of Defense. In 2020, the Pentagon granted NewsGuard a $25,000 prize for winning a contest on “COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation.”
During the pandemic, NewsGuard was a top promoter of the federal government’s messaging. The company claimed, for example, that the COVID-19 vaccine was the only cure for the virus. Its Coronavirus Misinformation Tracking Center continues to claim that scientific evidence showing the inefficacy of masks and social distancing is “false.” The organization is known for downrating websites that make certain COVID-19-related claims, such as stating that the virus came from a lab in Wuhan, China.
NewsGuard works closely with the Global Engagement Center (GEC), an office within the State Department whose stated mission is to “counter foreign disinformation.” The GEC has been described by former State Department official Mike Benz as “the first government censorship operation within the federal government.” House Republicans have referred to the GEC as “subsidized censorship of free speech and disfavored opinions.”
Some of the GEC’s projects involve working with groups funded by billionaire George Soros and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to track “disinformation spreaders” on social media. These include users who question the safety or efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines.
