Ninety miles from the South Eastern tip of the United States, Liberty has no stead. In order for Liberty to exist and thrive, Tyranny must be identified, recognized, confronted and extinguished.
"I am deeply offended by the ADL's messaging and any other groups who push de facto anti-white racism."
Elon Musk, has recently stirred controversy with his comments regarding the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Jewish communities. In a series of posts on his social media platform, Musk responded to claims that Jewish communities have been spreading "hatred against whites."
Musk agreed with a post claiming this and further criticized the ADL, stating, "The ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel." He suggested that the ADL, by its tenets, refrains from criticizing minority groups, which he perceives as a primary threat, apparently referring to Palestinians and Arabs.
In response to criticism that his comments generalized the Jewish community, Musk clarified that his criticism does not extend to all Jewish communities but is not limited to the ADL alone. He expressed being deeply offended by any group promoting anti-white, anti-Asian, or any form of racism.
Musk's comments have come under fire, with some users on his platform labeling them as antisemitic. This controversy emerges amid global concerns over rising antisemitism, exacerbated by recent attacks in Israel and the ongoing conflict in Gaza.
The ADL has criticized Musk's platform, accusing it of failing to enforce policies on antisemitism and hate speech. In response, Musk has threatened to sue the ADL and has been critical of their...
With government contracts and corporate backers, NewsGuard seeks to monetize the work of reshaping the internet.
In May 2021, L. Gordon Crovitz, a media executive turned start-up investor, pitched Twitter executives on a powerful censorship tool.
In an exchange that came to light in the “Twitter Files” revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, touted his product, NewsGuard, as a “Vaccine Against Misinformation.” His written pitch highlighted a “separate product” — beyond an extension already on the Microsoft Edge browser — “for internal use by content-moderation teams.” Crovitz promised an out-of-the-box tool that would use artificial intelligence powered by NewsGuard algorithms to rapidly screen content based on hashtags and search terms the company associated with dangerous content.
How would the company determine the truth? For issues such as Covid-19, NewsGuard would steer readers to official government sources only, like the federal Centers for Disease Control. Other content-moderation allies, Crovitz’s pitch noted, include “intelligence and national security officials,” “reputation management providers,” and “government agencies,” which contract with the firm to identify misinformation trends. Instead of only fact-checking individual forms of incorrect information, NewsGuard, in its proposal, touted the ability to rate the “overall reliability of websites” and “’prebunk’ COVID-19 misinformation from hundreds of popular websites.”
NewsGuard’s ultimately unsuccessful pitch sheds light on one aspect of a growing effort by governments around the world to police speech ranging from genuine disinformation to dissent from officially sanctioned narratives. In the United States, as the “Twitter Files” revealed, the effort often takes the form of direct government appeals to social media platforms and news outlets. More commonly the government works through seemingly benign non-governmental organizations — such as the Stanford Internet Observatory — to quell speech it disapproves of.
Or it pays to coerce speech through government contracts with outfits such as NewsGuard, a for-profit company of especially wide influence. Founded in 2018 by Crovitz and his co-CEO Steven Brill, a lawyer, journalist, and entrepreneur, NewsGuard seeks to monetize the work of reshaping the internet. The potential market for such speech policing, NewsGuard’s pitch to Twitter noted, was $1.74 billion, an industry it hoped to capture.
Instead of merely suggesting rebuttals to untrustworthy information, as many other existing anti-misinformation groups provide, NewsGuard has built a business model out of broad labels that classify entire news sites as safe or untrustworthy, using an individual grading system producing what it calls “nutrition labels.” The ratings — which appear next to a website’s name on the Microsoft Edge browser and other systems that deploy the plug-in — use a scale of zero to 100 based on what NewsGuard calls “nine apolitical criteria,” including “gathers and presents information responsibly” (worth 18 points), “avoids deceptive headlines” (10 points), and “does not repeatedly publish false or egregiously misleading content” (22 points), etc.
Critics note that such ratings are entirely subjective — The New York Times, for example, which repeatedly carried false and partisan information from anonymous sources during the Russiagate hoax, gets a 100 percent rating. RealClearInvestigations, which took heat in 2019 for unmasking the “whistleblower” of the first Trump impeachment (while many other outlets including the Times still have not), has an 80 percent rating. (Verbatim: the NewsGuard-RCI exchange over the whistleblower.) Independent news outlets with an anti-establishment bent receive particularly low ratings from NewsGuard, such as the libertarian news site Antiwar.com, with a 49.5 percent rating, and conservative site The Federalist, with a 12.5 percent rating.
As it stakes a claim to being the internet’s arbiter of trust, the company’s site says it has conducted reviews of some 95 percent of news sources across the English, French, German, and Italian web. It has also published reports about disinformation involving China and the Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Hamas wars. The model has received glowing profiles in CNN and The New York Times, among other outlets, as a viable solution for fighting fake news.
NewsGuard is pushing to apply its browser screening process to libraries, academic centers, news aggregation portals, and internet service providers. Its reach, however, is far greater because of other products it aims to sell to social media and other content moderation firms and advertisers. “An advertiser’s worst nightmare is having an ad placement damage even one customer’s trust in a brand,” said Crovitz in a press release touting NewsGuard’s “BrandGuard” service for advertisers. “We’re asking them to pay a fraction of what they pay their P.R. people and their lobbyists to...
