NewsGuard

Wikipedia coverage: Read the full Wikipedia article, including its references. The material below is the existing Deep Politics Wiki article.

propaganda, mass surveillance

NewsGuard () Twitter Website
File:NewsGuard RT.png NewsGuard warns that RT is unreliable
Founders	Steven Brill, Gordon Kravitz
Interests	Fake news
Membership	Don Baer, John Battelle, Silvia Bencivelli, Yves Clarisse, Arne Duncan, Alina Fichter, Giampiero Gramaglia, Michael Hayden, Leo Hindery Jr, Elise Jordan, Jessica Lessin, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Tom Ridge, Richard Sambrook, Richard Stengel, Brigitte Trafford, Ed Vaizey, Jimmy Wales
A tech company which is teaming up with Microsoft as regards "fake news"

NewsGuard is a company which purports to tackle "disinformation" through its browser extension.

Activities

{{#subobject: |Has superobject=NewsGuard |Has objectClass=Quotation |Has author=Anonymous|+sep=, |Has text=“A new app claiming to serve as a bulwark against "disinformation" by adding "trust rankings" to news websites has links to a PR firm that received nearly $15 million to push pro-Saudi spin in US media, Breitbart reports.

NewsGuard and its shady advisory board – consisting of truth-lovers such as Tom Ridge, the first-ever homeland security chief, and former CIA director Michael Hayden – came under scrutiny after Microsoft announced that the app would be built into its mobile browsers. A closer examination of the company's publicly listed investors, however, has revealed new reasons to be suspicious of this self-declared crusader against propaganda. As Breitbart discovered, NewsGuard's third-largest investor, Publicis Groupe, owns a PR firm that has repeatedly airbrushed Saudi Arabia.” |Is about=NewsGuard,Fake news, Tom Ridge, Suadi Arabia, Michael Hayden|+sep=, |Has wikipediaPage= |Has location=|+sep=, |Has publicationDate=29 January 2019 |Sourced from=RT |Has sourceDetails= |Has sourceTitle= |Has sourceName=RT |Has sourceURL=https://www.rt.com/news/450035-saudi-arabia-newsguard-pr-investor/

}}

“A new app claiming to serve as a bulwark against "disinformation" by adding "trust rankings" to news websites has links to a PR firm that received nearly $15 million to push pro-Saudi spin in US media, Breitbart reports. NewsGuard and its shady advisory board – consisting of truth-lovers such as Tom Ridge, the first-ever homeland security chief, and former CIA director Michael Hayden – came under scrutiny after Microsoft announced that the app would be built into its mobile browsers. A closer examination of the company's publicly listed investors, however, has revealed new reasons to be suspicious of this self-declared crusader against propaganda. As Breitbart discovered, NewsGuard's third-largest investor, Publicis Groupe, owns a PR firm that has repeatedly airbrushed Saudi Arabia.”
Anonymous (29 January 2019) 

Criticism

Breitbert notes that "WikiLeaks, which has never had to retract a story due to false or misleading information, is also given a “red” rating in contrast to the "green" which it gives to BuzzFeed, which was recently humiliated for publishing alleged details about the ongoing Mueller investigation that were contradicted by the spe[c]ial prosecutor himself. BuzzFeed did not retract the story, and even led with it on its frontpage … after Mueller contradicted it."

Uncritical usage by Wikipedia

Whitney Webb described in 2019 How a Small Group of Pro-Israel Activists Blacklisted MintPress on Wikipedia. The article describes, among other things, how Wikipedia cited Mint Press News' unfavourable rating from Newsguard, "several months after MintPress authored a viral exposè of Newsguard’s connections to neoconservatives and former government officials, including former CIA director Michael Hayden."

Tracking users

For each site someone with Newsguard installed visit, there will be a connection to "http://api.newsguardtech[.]com/check/[hostname of visited site]". The result will be cached locally for at most 30 minutes. The gathered information include the hostname of the site loaded in the current tab - i.e. more browsing history leakage.

"NewsGuard" will get this information:

• The sites you visit
• When you visited these sites, +- 30 minutes, or with better accuracy if you open the extension's popup panel
• Your public IP address
• Your browser, OS, language (through HTTP headers)

Funding

NewsGuard was awarded a $749,387 contract by the US Air Force (September 7, 2021 – December 8, 2022) for a "Misinformation Fingerprints" program aimed at combating "misinformation". NewsGuard also has disclosed that they received $25,000 from the US State Department and the US Cyber Command in 2020.

People

NewsGuard's Advisory Board as of May 2020.

References