Guess Which Outlet Internet Traffic Cop NewsGuard Is Applauding OpenAI for Partnering With

You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours seems to be NewsGuard’s attitude toward OpenAI. Gordon Crovitz, the Co-editor and chief of so-called media ratings firm NewsGuard, wrote an article praising OpenAI artificial intelligence ChatGPT’s use of “Trustworthy Journalism” in its answers. But trustworthy according to whom? Well, NewsGuard’s biased ratings system, of course. This comes just two and a half months after ChatGPT refused to answer which news sources are the worst and instead directed MRC Free Speech America researchers to look to NewsGuard ratings for answers.  “Trusting legacy media to train AI is just about as ridiculous as chickens trusting a fox to guard the hen house,” said Michael Morris, Director of MRC Free Speech America. “But that’s exactly what NewsGuard is asking users to do here, and that can only lead to one thing: a really bad day for the chickens.” In his recent article, Crovitz applauded OpenAI for its recent licensing agreement with The Financial Times (FT), which just so happens to have a 100/100 NewsGuard rating.  “The AI models are ‘trained’ on whatever they can find on the internet, so when people ask the chatbots about topics in the news, their responses are based on the news sources the models are able to access,” Crovitz wrote. “OpenAI just announced that the Financial Times is the latest news publisher to get a licensing agreement, which means that its ChatGPT will be able to use the highly regarded London-based source of financial and business news in its training data.”  FT has repeatedly shown its bias over the years including when in 2018 it made leftist billionaire George Soros its “person of the year.” The outlet has also propped up President Joe Biden when his bad economic policies predictably led to bad economic outcomes. “Unemployment rate in US falls unexpectedly to 13.3%,”  FT wrote in a headline. The Financial Times editor and columnist Edward Luce also parroted claims of the Russian collusion hoax when he was interviewed on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.  The AI platform is also reportedly negotiating similar licensing agreements with CNN  and Politico –which NewsGuard gave ratings of 80 and 100 respectively– along with News Corp. which owns a conglomeration of outlets, according to Bloomberg News.   Crovitz is also in no position to label what news is “trustworthy” as his own ratings firm has repeatedly shown bias and relaxed standards toward leftist media outlets while giving right-leaning media outlets low scores.  MRC Free Speech America has repeatedly shown that NewsGuard’s ratings system favors leftist media outlets. Using a media bias chart provided by AllSides in January 2023, the MRC exposed NewsGuard for giving a high average score of 91/100 to media on the “left” while slapping “a low average score of 66/100 to media on the “right”. This mirrored MRC’s previous studies which found very similar results. NewsGuard showed its true colors when The New York Times, TIME, Politico and Reuters each falsely reported that Israel was responsible for an airstrike on Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza. Those who did not just take Hamas’s health ministry at its word soon learned via U.S. intelligence assessment that the explosion was caused by a “failed rocket launch by militant terrorists,” as Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) put it. Despite the very public flub, Time, Politico and Reuters each continue to have a perfect 100/100 rating from NewsGuard. While NewsGuard docked The Times’s score in February and mentioned the Gaza hospital fake news that the leftist rag published, the ratings firm notably did not reduce the score due to its criteria that media outlets not “repeatedly publish false or egregiously misleading content.” Instead, NewsGuard lowered the media outlet’s score because The Times no longer “Handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly.” NewsGuard gave USA Today a perfect score, which did not even change after the outlet admitted to publishing 23 fabricated stories in 2022. Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the CensorTrack contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

Tit for Tat? Apple Censors US Social Media Apps at Request of Chinese Gov’t After TikTok Ultimatum

Did Apple just help China retaliate against America’s possible TikTok ban? Apple has long invested heavily in Chinese markets, and, based on a recent report, the company is willing to exercise censorship to maintain those markets. Bloomberg reportedon April 18 that Apple Inc. had removed at least four social media services from its Chinese App Store, including two Meta-owned apps. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which Bloomberg called “one of the world’s most rigid internet censorship regimes,” demanded that Apple remove the apps over alleged “national security” concerns. Apple complied just after President Joe Biden signed a bill forcing TikTok to either relinquish its Chinese communist government ties or leave the country. The process of both bans have been ongoing, however. Bloomberg explained, “The orders come on the heels of a cleanup program Chinese regulators initiated in 2023 that was expected to remove many defunct or unregistered apps from domestic iOS and Android stores.” Mobile app developers were reportedly required to complete registration with the CCP by the end of March or be forced to cease operating. The censored apps are Meta’s Threads and WhatsApp, along with Signal and Telegram. In a statement obtained by Bloomberg, Apple claimed that it disagreed with the CCP’s demands but had to follow them. “We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree. The Cyberspace Administration of China ordered the removal of these apps from the China storefront based on their national security concerns,” Apple stated, per Bloomberg. “These apps remain available for download on all other storefronts where they appear.” The dictatorial CCP’s “Great Firewall” has long banned foreign social media apps, including Facebook and Twitter (now X). Asia-Pacific news site The Diplomat, noted that Chinese users can be sentenced to years in prison for criticizing CCP officials. American companies’ operations in Communist China continue to be controversial, as do the operations of Chinese companies in America. President Joe Biden signed a bill a week ago that gives TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance a choice between selling TikTok or having the popular app banned. The CCP owns a board seat and maintains a financial stake in ByteDance, and multiple reports claim Chinese employees have access to U.S. TikTok user data, raising national security concerns.  Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

The ‘Mary Poppins’ of Censorship Is Back — Again!

The winds have unfortunately changed and brought the former director of the defunct Disinformation Governance Board back — and with her a new censorship organization. Nina Jankowicz, the self-proclaimed “Mary Poppins of disinformation,” announced her newest censorship venture, The American Sunlight Project. During an interview with CNN’s America’s Choice, Jankowicz described her group as “bipartisan” and “big tent,” claiming to “represent people on both sides of the political spectrum.” But as is often the case with these allegedly neutral censorship efforts that attack free speech, bipartisanship seems to be the spoonful of sugar that helps the bias go down. Apparently, nobody told Jankwicz that if you want to be considered “bipartisan,” maybe don’t attack Republicans and “conservative media,” calling them “extremists” in a welcome blog on your website. “Since April 2022, extremists have been running a campaign to undermine critical disinformation research ahead of the 2024 election and beyond,” the group wrote, linking to an article from The New York Times titled “How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation.” The group continued, “Encompassing elected officials, conservative media, attorneys, paid-for ‘journalists,’ and online influencers, the campaign has falsely claimed the Federal Government is overseeing a vast censorship regime in coordination with social media platforms, academic institutions, and civil society organizations.” The American Sunlight Project seems to be dismissing the very real concerns that came from The Twitter files and The Facebook Files, which showed executive branch agencies and non-profit groups pressuring Big Tech companies and their employees a censor posts. The new group even sent a carefully worded letter to the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government condemning the committee’s investigations into Big Tech-government collusion and calling for more transparency. Jankowicz has even repeatedly painted so-called “disinformation” researchers, censors really, as victims of government oversight and public criticism, and her new group is following suit. In its welcome blog, The American Sunlight Project even went so far as to call these researchers “canaries in the coal mine” who are being “snuffed out” and “intimidated” by the Select Subcommittee’s investigations. The group placed an emphasis on being not only bipartisan but also transparent. And yet when asked about her donors in an interview with The New York Times, Jankowicz kept her donors in the shadows and out of the “Sunlight.” Jankowicz was previously the director of the now-defunct Disinformation Governance Board, also known as the Ministry of Truth. She was criticized heavily in 2022 for her support of Twitter’s fact-checking program “Bird Watch” and “demoting content.” She also repeatedly framed, without evidence, the New York Post’‘s Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian propaganda. Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

US Gives TikTok an Ultimatum: Sell or Wave American Market Goodbye

TikTok might be on its way out of America if it does not separate from its ties to the communist Chinese government. After House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-AL) maneuvered to include a TikTok ultimatum in a bipartisan foreign aid package, President Joe Biden signed H.R.815 Wednesday. The foreign aid spending bill forces TikTok’s  Chinese-controlled parent company, ByteDance to divest itself from TikTok, or risk being banned from the U.S. The legislation also penalizes app stores and web hosting services that carry foreign adversary-controlled apps or websites to American users barring divestiture. The law applies not just to Chinese-controlled apps, but also to those controlled by Russia, Iran and North Korea. TikTok must divest itself from China if it wants to do business in the United States. We at the MRC have been consistent from the beginning. TikTok is a national security threat. @BrentBozell pic.twitter.com/FfSh1futU3 — Media Research Center (@theMRC) March 12, 2024 The new law empowers Biden to effectively block TikTok from doing business in the U.S. if ByteDance does not sell it to a company not based out of the forenamed countries.  The legislation gives TikTok nine months to decide whether or not to divest, which ends notably just after the 2024 presidential election. Biden, who endorsed the TikTok provision, can even grant an additional three-month grace period. Biden, however, will have to do more than sign a bill to prove he is serious about banning TikTok. As MRC has repeatedly noted, the president has actively used TikTok for his 2024 presidential campaign. To date, he has posted 149 TikTok videos even though he issued an executive order two years ago barring federal employees from using the app on government-issued devices. 🚨 @SpeakerJohnson won a victory for America's security, but now our Commander-in-Chief needs to abide by both the spirit and the letter of the law. President Biden has signed into law the bill requiring TikTok to separate itself from its masters at the Chinese Communist Party,… — Media Research Center (@theMRC) April 24, 2024 “Biden wants to have it both ways,” MRC wrote in a statement. “He wants to run out in front of the parade to eliminate a serious security threat from America’s biggest adversary while simultaneously using TikTok in a lame attempt to lure back voters who have grown tired of his failed policies.” When legislation targeting foreign adversary apps was first introduced by the House, in March, MRC President Brent Bozell came out in support of the bill. “It is absolutely correct and necessary for TikTok to divest itself of any control from the communist Chinese government in China if it wants to do business in the United States,” he said. While the bill puts great emphasis on national security concerns associated with the communist Chinese government-tied TikTok app, some Republicans and free speech advocates fear that it could be abused in ways that may hinder freedom of speech with regard to other platforms. The law will fine violating app stores and web hosting services $5,000 per user for violations of the provision. X owner Elon Musk and Reps. Thomas Massie (R- WV) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have voiced concern that if the legislation is abused, it could lead to more online censorship. In an interview with Newsmax’s First Edition, MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider addressed similar concerns about government overreach and abuse. He said critics were “right to be concerned especially with Biden sitting there in the white house with all the 25-year-olds who are pulling the strings and moving his mouth and lips.” Schneider added, however, that “under our constitution, the president is the one who controls our foreign policy and right now China is such a threat to America that they are actively infiltrating America both with troops and with data, scouring the internet for all our information. They are working aggressively to control us and TikTok is their number one tool and it’s got to be stopped.   Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

39 Times Facebook Interfered in US Elections Since 2008

If Facebook, the company, had a personal Facebook profile, its “relationship status” with free speech would say, “It’s complicated.” The platform, however, has consistently courted election interference efforts. MRC Free Speech America researchers compiled 39 times Facebook was caught interfering in U.S. elections since 2008. The platform’s record of election-interfering censorship began in 2012, reached a crescendo in 2020 and has begun fading somewhat in the early stages of the 2024 electoral cycle. All the while, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly made pro-free speech comments including during his famous 2019 speech at Georgetown University. “We can either continue to stand for free expression understanding its messiness but believing that the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us. Or we can decide that the cost is simply too great,” said Zuckerberg. “I'm here today because I believe that we must continue to stand for free expression.” He has similarly called politically-motivated censorship “dangerous” and said that Facebook and other social media platforms should not be acting as the “arbiter of truth.” And yet, from 2012 through 2024, Facebook has vacillated between a hands-off approach to free speech online and repeated election interference through policy changes and outright censorship of political candidates and ideas. Below are some of the highlights of MRC’s findings. In 2012, Facebook suspended a Veteran PAC for a meme drawing attention to the attack on Benghazi. Just over a week before the 2012 presidential election, Facebook suspended the account of Special Operations Speaks, a veteran-led PAC. The group had posted a meme reminding its followers that Navy SEALs were denied backup during the tragic terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The meme showed pictures of then-President Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden along with the words “Obama called on the SEALs and THEY got bin Laden. When the SEALs called on Obama THEY GOT DENIED,” Breitbart News reported. Facebook removed the post, which it claimed “violate[d] Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities,” according to screenshots Breitbart News included in its reporting. The page administrator proceeded to repost the meme, which was subsequently also removed. After Breitbart News ran the story, then-Facebook Manager Andrew Noyes responded to the accusation denying all fault. “I assure you that removing the image was not an act of censorship on our part. This was an error and we apologize for any inconvenience it may have caused,” he reportedly wrote.  In 2016, Facebook censored then-Democratic Party candidate for president Bernie Sanders and “conservative topics” and news. Facebook used to have a trending section on its website that included trending news manually curated by contractors. Several of the curators who worked for Facebook in 2014 and 2015 told Gizmodo the articles that appeared in Facebook’s Trending News section often depended on the biases of the curator and what Facebook wanted to be trending at the time. “Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” a former curator who asked to remain anonymous said. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.” Stories about then-presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) were also reportedly excluded. Facebook’s anti-spam algorithm also flagged many different Facebook groups, including six groups created for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) supporters, in the Democratic Party primary race against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  In 2018, Facebook censored multiple candidates for Congress and state legislatures. Facebook removed ads for Sen. (then-Rep.) Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) and Michigan state Senate Republican candidate Aric Nesbitt. The platform additionally censored an ad promoting border security paid for by then-President Donald Trump. Similarly, the platform reportedly removed a video promoting an AR-15 giveaway that Senate candidate Austin Petersen (R-MO) was conducting on his own website. In 2020, censorship on Facebook exploded.  The platform censored posts and ads from then-sitting President Donald Trump at least four times and took down seven political ads paid for by the political right. One of these ad campaigns Facebook killed just over a month before the election. The ad reportedly pointed out the incongruence between Democrats’ open borders and COVID-19 lockdown policies. The Washington Post reported at the time, “There were more than 30 versions of the ad running on the social network, according to Facebook’s ad transparency library. It had gathered between 200,000 and 250,000 impressions.” Other candidates impacted by censorship included Rep. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Florida candidate and activist Laura Loomer (R) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).  2020 election interference came to a head, however, when the platform censored the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden report documenting the Biden family’s financial scandals and then ultimately placed an indefinite suspension on then-sitting President Trump’s accounts shortly into 2021. In 2022, Facebook censored multiple gubernatorial candidates and candidates for U.S. Congress. The platform censored Rep. (then candidate) Rich McCormick (R-GA), Virginia GOP congressional candidate Jarome Bell, Tennessee GOP congressional candidate Robby Starbuck, and Missouri GOP U.S. Senate candidate Eric Greitens. In McCormick’s case, the congressman made an ad criticizing President Joe Biden’s “disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.” Facebook removed the ad for violating its “'Disruptive Content' policy," McCormick wrote in a Facebook post. The platform similarly censored Arizona, Alabama and Texas Republican gubernatorial candidates Kari Lake, Governor Kay Ivey and Chad Prather respectively. In the case of Lake, she said her Instagram account was restricted for 24 hours after “posting photos of Arizona and Arizonans.” In 2024, Facebook and Instagram are limiting users’ access to political content. Meta already began limiting its distribution of political content in 2022 but has continued to lean into that in the lead-up to the 2024 election. In February, Meta announced that Instagram and Threads (a new social media platform owned by Meta) will no longer recommend political content by default, but users can opt in to having such content promoted to them. “If you decide to follow accounts that post political content, we don’t want to get between you and their posts, but we also don’t want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow,” Instagram wrote in a blog. “So we’re extending our existing approach to how we treat political content – we won’t proactively recommend content about politics on recommendation surfaces across Instagram and Threads.” Although the move sounds harmless, it makes it more difficult for those who produce political content to grow their page and for more viewers to decide for themselves whether or not they want to follow that content. The platform has also censored GOP presidential candidate Larry Elder, Democrat-turned-Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.   Recommendations House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) should direct relevant committees and committee chairmen to investigate Facebook for interfering in elections. State legislatures should ensure that Big Tech cannot engage in viewpoint discrimination. State attorneys general and state secretaries of state should take appropriate action to enforce state election laws as it relates to Facebook’s election interference.  In the spirit of openness and transparency, Facebook should establish a bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission to address the election interference and censorship issues outlined in this report.   You can read the full study here.