The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has asked Big Tech companies to report their use of the news rating company NewsGuard, which has been called “Orwellian” and is known for its leftist bias.

NewsGuard may very well be disbanded by the FCC, with Commissioner Brendan Carr calling the outfit a "censorship cartel" that is an affront to Americans’ constitutional freedoms.

Congress must join the FCC in condemning NewsGuard  – send an urgent message today. 

LifeSiteNews is among those news agencies to have been slapped with a warning label by NewsGuard, who falsely claim that LifeSiteNews “generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability”.

Writing to the CEOs of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple last week, the FCC are now demanding that they disclose the extent of their use of the “Orwellian” NewsGuard.

“Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft & others have played central roles in the censorship cartel,” FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote on X in a post showing his letter to the Big Tech companies.

"Big Tech companies silenced Americans for doing nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights. They targeted core political, religious, and scientific speech. And they worked - often in concert with so-called ‘media monitors’ and others – to defund, demonetize, and otherwise put out of business news outlets and organizations that dared to deviate from an approved narrative," the Commissioner stated.

Carr called out Big Tech for collaborating with “so-called fact checking” groups like NewsGuard in an effort to block or suppress websites and social media posts or demonize them as “untrustworthy.”

“This censorship cartel is an affront to Americans’ constitutional freedoms and must be completely dismantled … Indeed, our democracy depends on freedom of expression,” Carr wrote.

According to Carr, Big Tech’s work with NewsGuard in particular calls into question a condition of their legal “liability shield,” which allows them to restrict access to “objectionable” material — that condition being that they are operating in “good faith.” 

NewsGuard rates media outlets for what it deems “reliability” and “transparency,” and presents itself as the “internet’s arbiter of truth,” with its co-founder even calling it a “vaccine against misinformation,” as Carr noted. Once it does this, it effectively promotes or suppresses news media outlets by “leveraging its partnerships” with ad agencies, to whom it signals that certain outlets are “unsafe” to advertise on. 

As one example of its attempted interference with free speech, the conservative media organization PragerU has told The Epoch Times that it was asked by NewsGuard “to stop criticizing the COVID-19 lockdown policies, stop questioning the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, and “stop talking about any COVID-19 treatments not endorsed by the government” as a condition of having its red label lifted.

Internet web browsers such as Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari, and Microsoft’s Bing use NewsGuard, as do social media companies, making the “credibility” group effectively built in to internet users’ experience. NewsGuard is also pitched for use by entire institutions, such as schools and libraries, triggering an alert when a user comes across a badly rated site that warns, “Proceed with caution. This website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.” 

Demand that Congress put an end to leftist online censorship – send an urgent message today. 

NewsGuard's mission facilitates an unconstitutional censorship of conservative media. Not only is it used by social media companies, but major web browsers use NewsGuard as well, making it more difficult to find information that doesn’t fit into the mainstream media’s narratives.

For example, NewsGuard described as a “myth” the claim that “A document on the FDA website shows that two participants died as a result of ‘serious adverse events’ from an experimental COVID-19 vaccine.” Yet, a Pfizer document was released in April 2023 reporting that two babies died from premature delivery after their mothers were injected with the Pfizer COVID jab during a trial phase, describing the premature deliveries as “adverse events.” 

It has also, according to Carr, “consistently rated official propaganda from the Communist Party of China as more credible than American publications,” and “aggressively fact checked and penalized websites that reported on the COVID-19 lab leak theory.” 

Demand that Congress put an end to leftist censorship – send an urgent message today. 

We must demand that the First Amendment right of free speech be protected by our lawmakers. Limiting people’s access to different viewpoints is entirely unconstitutional.