Another day, another NewsGuard mudsling against the First Amendment.
NewsGuard, a wildly biased website rating firm, attempted to tarnish Elon Musk's Twitter using its flawed rating system. Musk has expressed an eagerness to promote free speech and eschew unfair censorship on the platform, but not without a fight by NewsGuard.
“Twitter’s most popular NewsGuard Red-Rated untrustworthy accounts garnered 57.04% increase in engagement in the week following the change in ownership,” NewsGuard wrote in an article Friday.
New Twitter CEO Musk’s pro-free-speech stance has apparently encouraged “greater activity by malign actors, boosting the popularity of misinformation on the platform,” the article reads.
Though NewsGuard boasted it uses “basic apolitical criteria of journalistic practice,” a December 2021 MRC Free Speech America study revealed NewsGuard’s extraordinary left-wing bias. The analysis found that NewsGuard on average rated liberal news outlets 27 points higher than right-leaning news organizations.
Musk acquired Twitter on Oct. 27.
NewsGuard used a social media monitoring company called NewsWhip to track the spread of so-called misinformation among the 25 most followed Twitter accounts. The week following Musk's Twitter purchase, the firm found that tweets by the 25 accounts “linked to publishers that NewsGuard has assessed as repeatedly spreading false information garnered 3,115,664 likes and retweets.”
The article continued: “Two weeks prior to the acquisition, Oct. 13-Oct. 20, 2022, those same accounts received 1,983,953 likes and retweets,” accounting for a more than 57-percent “cumulative increase post-Musk.”
The 25 tracked accounts are in the “top-50 most followed NewsGuard-rated untrustworthy accounts,” NewsGuard wrote.
NewsGuard took specific aim at two of the 25 accounts that it lambasted as publishing “false” claims about COVID-19: Dr. Joseph Mercola and Dr. Christiane Northrup.
Mercola turned to Substack after YouTube in September 2021 banned his account for spreading so-called COVID-19 “misinformation.”
NewsGuard complained that Mercola “published numerous false claims about vaccines and the COVID-19 pandemic, and that Mercola’s Twitter interactions “rose from 932 to 19,259, a 1966.42% increase in engagement and the largest increase measured by NewsGuard.”
The article also included a tweet of a meme Northrup posted on Oct. 28, depicting a cartooned Musk mocking a caricatured, crying leftist.
NewsGuard portrayed Northrup as “a self-described wellness expert that has also repeatedly published false information about COVID-19.”
Maybe get a sense of humor, NewsGuard?
Conservatives are under attack. Contact ABC News 818-460-7477, CBS News 212-975-3247 and NBC News 212-664-6192 and demand they report on NewsGuard’s clear left-wing bias.
