NewsGuard

NewsGuard (Propaganda, Mass surveillance)
NewsGuard warns that RT is unreliable
Founder	•  Steven Brill •  Gordon Kravitz
Interests	Fake news
Sponsored by	Publicis Groupe, US/Air Force
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

“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) fir 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.

 

Known members

8 of the 18 of the members already have pages here:

Member	Description
John Battelle	Helped launch Wired in the 1990s. Young Global Leaders. On the Advisory Board of the CIA-front NewsGuard
Arne Duncan	Educational bureaucrat; United States Secretary of Education under 7 years of Obama.
Michael Hayden	US Spook, NSA Director 1999-2005, CIA Director 2006-2009, News Guard advisory board
Anders Fogh Rasmussen	Bilderberger, ex Danish PM, ex-Secretary General of NATO.
Richard Sambrook
Richard Stengel	Senio US Propagandist "Having once been almost a First Amendment absolutist, I have really moved my position on it, because I just think for practical reasons..."
Ed Vaizey	UK politician, Merton College Oxford, Henry Jackson Society, NewsGuard/Advisory Board, Notting Hill Set
Jimmy Wales	Founder of super-influential Wikipedia. Tony Blair aide's is (strategically?) married to him.

 

Sponsors

Event	Description
Publicis Groupe	French multinational advertising and public relations company
US/Air Force

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