The seal of the Department of Defense is seen on the podium at the Pentagon, Sept. 27, 2022, in Washington. President Joe Biden will sign an executive order that gives decisions on the prosecution of serious military crimes, including sexual …A media publication is striking back at NewsGuard, an American company that gives clients “reliability ratings and scores” for hundreds of news and information websites and often tags conservative sites with low grades.
NewsGuard earlier this year told The Washington Times the government money paid for a licensing agreement for the department to use its artificial intelligence disinformation tracking product and is not funding their rating service. “Our analysts alert officials in the U.S. and in other democracies, including Ukraine, about new false narratives targeting America and its allies, and we provide an understanding of how this disinformation spreads online. We are proud of our work countering Russian and Chinese disinformation on behalf of Western democracies,” Mr. Crovitz said.
The lawyer representing Consortium News, constitutional law expert Bruce Afran, told The Times that NewsGuard’s monitoring is a form of “internet nannying.” He said it is a significant threat to free speech “because it really attempts to compel organizations to silence dissenting speech, or speech that challenges government policy.”
“We help you decide which news sources to trust — with scores from humans, not algorithms,” the company website states.