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This past month FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr took up the work of NewsGuard in a letter to the chief executive officers of Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Meta (Facebook), and Apple. I learned of the existence of the letter in Carr’s NewsNation interview with Chris Cuomo posted here by RCP. Carr is President Trump’s pick to chair the FCC. In the interview with Cuomo he states that he will seek to “smash th[e] censorship cartel.”

In his letter Carr explains that he is “writing to obtain information about your work with one specific organization—the Orwellian named NewsGuard.” Boom!

The following excerpt addresses the companies’ use of NewsGuard (footnotes omitted, full text here):

As exposed by the Twitter Files, NewsGuard is a for-profit company that operates as part of the broader censorship cartel. Indeed, NewsGuard bills itself as the Internet’s arbiter of truth or, as its co-founder put it, a “Vaccine Against Misinformation.” NewsGuard purports to rate the credibility of news and information outlets and tells readers and advertisers which outlets they can trust. As the U.S. House Committee on Small Business 2024 Staff Report stated, “[t]hese ratings, combined with NewsGuard’s vast partnerships in the advertising industry, select winners and losers in the news media space.” NewsGuard does so by leveraging its partnerships with advertising agencies to effectively censors [sic] targeted outlets.

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.

But NewsGuard’s own track record raises questions about whether relying on the organization’s products would constitute “good faith” actions within the meaning of Section 230. For one, reports indicate that NewsGuard has consistently rated official propaganda from the Communist Party of China as more credible than American publications. For another, NewsGuard aggressively fact checked and penalized websites that reported on the COVID-19 lab leak theory. For still another, the Small Business Committee and multiple Media Research Center studies detail numerous instances where NewsGuard apparently does not apply its own rating system in an even-handed manner. The list goes on.

Indeed, NewsGuard is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability for its impact on protected First Amendment speech. And while NewsGuard claims that its mission is to provide apolitical guidance on “misinformation,” NewsGuard undercuts this claim by retaining on its Advisory Board at least one person that 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.

I have written about our own close encounter with NewsGuard. Most recently, for example, I wrote about it here.

NewsGuard is not happy about Carr’s letter. In response it has compiled testimonials to its impartial good works here. NewsGuard does not address its alleged contribution of the censorship-industrial complex. One might infer that its response tends to support Carr’s assessment of the business.