Misinformation Watchdog or Taxpayer-Funded Censor?

Incoming FCC commissioner Brendan Carr recently announced his intentions to investigate NewsGuard. This company publishes “misinformation” ratings of websites based on a scoring system from its self-described “fact checkers.” NewsGuard’s most distinctive feature comes from its integrated browser plug-in, which aims to affix these ratings to search engine results. According to the group’s website, NewsGuard has “partnerships” with several tech giants to encourage the adoption of its app and content ratings. In doing so, they intend for their “Nutrition Label” ratings to promote websites that they deem trustworthy while also de-boosting sites that receive “yellow” or “red” warning labels for alleged promotion of “misinformation.”

In the wake of Carr’s decision, a number of civil libertarians rushed to NewsGuard’s defense. Ari Cohn of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) depicted Carr’s letter as an assault on NewsGuard’s own freedom of speech, describing it as a “private fact-checking group” whose First Amendment rights to rate websites are imperiled by the investigative threats of the government. On the surface, this charge might seem plausible, except for one conveniently omitted fact. NewsGuard isn’t being entirely transparent about the “private” nature of its business. In reality, the company is the recipient of multiple contracts from the federal government as part of the Biden White House’s initiatives to counter “misinformation” online.

In 2021, the Department of Defense paid NewsGuard almost $750,000 for a project to track “misinformation fingerprints” on the internet. Another award from the State Department’s “Global Engagement Center” gave NewsGuard $25,000 for access to its website rating system as part of another vaguely elaborated government initiative to combat online “misinformation.” NewsGuard also boasts of its connections to a web of federal agencies in the defense and intelligence sector. Former CIA spy chief Michael Hayden and former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge sit on its advisory board. The company’s website boasts of similar “partnerships” with the British government to “detect misinformation narratives” and the World Health Organization to fight “online COVID-19 misinformation online” (sic). In these contexts, the ostensibly “private” company begins to look like it’s serving as a paid partner to several high-level government entities supporting their efforts to police online content.

From a constitutional standpoint, that’s a huge red flag. If the federal government launched its own agency to review online content, rate private websites, and pressure tech companies to flag or deboost disliked content, it would likely run afoul of the First Amendment’s free speech protections. But what if the government contracts with the private sector to do some of this dirty work? The Supreme Court has long held that government agencies cannot outsource constitutionally-prohibited activities to private companies. 

As Carr has suggested, NewsGuard’s close relationship with the federal government may cross this line. At a minimum, it warrants investigation, given that taxpayer dollars are involved in their “misinformation” contracts. To this end, the House Oversight Committee is conducting a parallel investigation of these expenditures and recently asked for NewsGuard to disclose “all documents and communications between NewsGuard and any federal department or agency relating to any contract, grant, or other work performed by NewsGuard for or in conjunction with any federal department or agency.”

In response, NewsGuard now insists that it “never contracted with the U.S. government to rate or “screen” websites.” Instead, the company describes the aforementioned contracts as a “licensure” arrangement to allow the use of its website rating data and services. Their claims here amount to a distinction without a difference. Indeed, NewsGuard’s own press release from 2020, announcing one of the aforementioned Pentagon contracts, boasted that the company would be providing the government with “[a]ccess to NewsGuard’s constantly updated database of journalist-produced ratings and “Nutrition Labels” for thousands of news and information websites in the U.S. and Europe” as well as a “database of Misinformation Fingerprints” to flag “stories, social media posts, videos” and other online content.

While NewsGuard claims that it is only policing known and verified “misinformation” from other sources, the company’s track record suggests that it contributes to spreading online misinformation of its own.

In 2021, I experienced NewsGuard’s shady tactics firsthand when one of their “fact checkers” targeted content relating to the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) over alleged “Covid misinformation.” NewsGuard’s self-appointed “fact checker,” John Gregory, peppered me with tendentiously-argued inquiries, all of which aimed to build his case for a negative website review. Rather than acquiesce to their obviously biased rating system, I pushed back and decided to put NewsGuard under the microscope. My colleague Ethan Yang and I took NewsGuard’s own “Nutrition Label” rubric and applied it to their company. We evaluated their website using their own multi-pronged scoring system, which awards points based on content accuracy, willingness to make corrections, transparency of funding, and similar categories. As of August 2021, NewsGuard failed its own scoring system at just 36.25 points out of a possible 100. They actually performed worse than most of the websites they rated.

Our investigation also revealed that NewsGuard trafficked in plenty of COVID misinformation, usually for overtly political reasons to push the company’s—and federal government’s—pro-lockdown stance. Despite posturing as a “healthcare” misinformation reporter, Gregory possessed no medical or public health policy credentials. He simply had strong pro-lockdown political opinions. Several of the sources he relied on for “fact checks” just regurgitated talking points by politicians and used them to evaluate and penalize scientific dissent from government positions.

For example, his main cited source for attacking the Great Barrington Declaration and defending the efficacy of lockdowns was former British Health Secretary Matt Hancock. In no small irony, Hancock resigned in disgrace in June 2021, a few days after NewsGuard first contacted me to commence their smear of the GBD. An investigation in the UK determined that Hancock violated the same lockdown protocols he was tasked with enforcing at the peak of the fall 2020 Covid wave.

NewsGuard’s website reviewers also exhibited a pronounced bias against the lab leak origin theory of COVID-19. Echoing cues from Anthony Fauci, the site’s “fact checkers” designated the lab leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory” and set out to discredit it as “Covid misinformation.” Dating back to the pandemic’s start, NewsGuard peppered dozens of private websites and mainstream news outlets with threatening “fact check” inquiries for daring even to mention the lab leak hypothesis.

I responded to NewsGuard’s inquiries from 2021 by pointing out that the lab leak hypothesis had gained support from a growing body of scientific literature and U.S. intelligence agency assessments. In a matter of hours, Gregory scrubbed his Twitter feed of earlier attacks on websites that covered the lab leak story. Shortly afterward, NewsGuard posted a statement on its website admitting that their ratings had “mischaracterized the sites’ claims about the lab leak theory, referred to the lab leak as a “conspiracy theory,” or wrongly grouped together unproven claims about the lab leak with the separate, false claim that the COVID-19 virus was man-made.” In total, NewsGuard was forced to revise its reports on at least 21 websites after inappropriately dinging them for reporting on the lab leak hypothesis.

Imagine my surprise then when NewsGuard’s co-CEO Gordon Crovitz released a response to FCC Commissioner Carr’s inquiry, dated November 18, 2024. Citing the ongoing House investigation, Carr noted that “NewsGuard aggressively fact-checked and penalized websites that reported on the COVID-19 lab leak theory.”

Writing for NewsGuard, Crovitz responded to Carr by trying to cover his company’s tracks: “We…have never given a site a lower score for publishing the lab leak theory, which, unlike many other entities, we have always found to be credible and not misinformation.”

Regardless of what else the ongoing investigations reveal, one thing is certain: Taxpayers have a right to know why the federal government gave hundreds of thousands in public resources to a “misinformation” tracking company that wantonly misinforms the public about its own activities and history.