Recently, NewsGuard decided that it would seek to profit off the COVID-19 crisis by elevating itself as the "premier authority" for deciding what websites can and can't be trusted to provide information as a result blanket banning whole publications including Activist Post. Beyond that, the propagandists' consortium of "fact-checkers" one of which writes promotions for Disney, (who is totally qualified to tell you what to think) is offering this service for free, but only during the COVID pandemic. In other words, they are seeking to profit by gaining new subscribers while harming others in the independent press' livelihoods who are just spreading information and asking questions through critical thinking sparking debates.
Granted, even I personally don't agree with some of the information being put out in regards to COVID-19; however, even if I disagree with an opinion, I will fight to the death for your right to express it. Because that's freedom of speech; the First Amendment is there for the speech you don't like and not the speech you do, healthy debate is a part of a free democratic society. Failure to not let people have opinions invites tyranny and banning discussion of one topic leads to the next as it opens the door to censorship on anything else. NewsGuard if you take away our right to freely openly debate about things with each other you, in turn, invite violent blowback inflaming extremism.
This isn't communist China and what we are witnessing is frightening to say the least. Even statements by doctors/scientists with dissenting opinions are being banned or flagged as false by people in most cases who are not experts in those fields, which that's a telling sign of where we are heading as a society.
The reason this is a pandemic in the first place is reportedly that China ignored and arrested several doctors, including Li Wenliang a Chinese doctor who was one of the first to sound the alarm on the Wuhan coronavirus, CNN reported.
In most cases, many websites named, including ZeroHedge, are just responsible for aggregating or republishing information from the mainstream press. Those in the establishment media aren't being banned or treated the same way for questioning COVID-19 or digging into the topic. In essence, NewsGuard is saying who can and can't be an investigative journalist (a job which requires extensive digging) and what topics are okay and not acceptable to report on. Essentially, if you have a single opposing dissenting thought about a topic you can now be written off as "fake news" and put under a no-review blanket banning content filter, without a judge or jury and no way to appeal.
Specifically, the plugin which touts itself as "fighting #misinformation with trust ratings for thousands of news sites–right in your browser," admits themselves that they are not reviewing individual authors' claims or articles and they suggest blanket banning websites at the domain level using artificial intelligence.
This wouldn't be a problem if the plugin wasn't being utilized by Facebook, the largest social network in the world to blacklist websites reach, Microsoft, and many others. That's not all, they have a BrandGuard, which they market to advertisers as a “brand safety tool aimed at helping advertisers keep their brands off of unreliable news and information sites while giving them the assurance they need to support thousands of Green-rated [NewsGuard-approved] news and information sites, big and small.”
These companies are all collectively directly walking us into 1984 with a company with intelligence spooks on its Board of Directors. As a result, now spreading information or asking questions that are not rubber-stamped with a golden seal by the establishment could result in the shadow banning of your website and the inability to share articles and free thought of opinionated ideas with a larger audience.
It's no surprise really that someone out there in the world would attempt to be the arbiter of truth and information or Ministry Of Truth suppressing opinions online. But doing so has several real-world consequences; in this case, you are now challenging everyone in the independent media and this means all of your own conflicting issues are fair game for nitpicking.
Let's talk about that conflicting interest, which is the even more alarming scary thing happening here. NewsGuard has deep connections to government and Silicon Valley on its advisory board as this reporter has reported previously. To quickly summarize some of those connections - advisors for NewsGuard include Tom Ridge, the former secretary of Homeland Security, Richard Stengel, former editor of Time magazine, and Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy (Obama administration), (Ret.) General Michael Hayden, former Director of the CIA, former Director of the National Security Agency and former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence (George W. Bush administration), Don Baer, chairman of Burson, Cohn & Wolfe and former White House Communications Director (Clinton administration), Elise Jordan, political analyst, NBC, and former speechwriter for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Oh and then there are the journalists (traitors of free speech) like John Battelle, co-founding editor of Wired and founding chief executive of Industry Standard and Jessica Lessin, founder, and editor-in-chief of The Information.
If you aren’t worried about a company with a former CIA director (who lied under oath to Congress misleading officials, according to the Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation program) and a former secretary of Homeland Security official as its advisors, you may need a reality check.
The company is also lobbying to have its "news rankings" plugin installed by default on computers in the U.S. at public libraries, schools, and universities as well as on all smartphones and computers sold in the United States. New York Post writes an opinion piece that the technology is more of a problem than fake news itself.
"In taking on the role of news police, NewsGuard pushes the ideal of a well-informed citizenry further out of reach," the Post writes.
Things aren't going to change until we peacefully stand up and do something about it, expressing outrage, or one of these organizations like NewsGuard causes someone with nothing left to lose to walk in its doors with a little less sanity than me strapped with a banana clip. The alternative non-violent response is innocent people get their private information put on the darknet. To reiterate that thought, if it's still not clear someone is going to get hurt.
I would like to stop any of those responses from coming to fruition by instead suing NewsGuard for defamatory damage to our reputations, libel, and anything else I can hit them with. If you can help with this effort and care about it, please reach out, our future ability to share information and have a free and open discussion depends on it.
I'll end with a question, did anyone think this through before saying, “oh yeah I want to help destroy the livelihoods of other people?”
My well-thought-out trained analytical expert guess is, “no they probably did not.”