It looks like the Federal Communications Commission under Brendan Carr won’t be the only agency looking to tear down the government-backed dystopian activities of website traffic cop NewsGuard.
Federal Trade Commissioner Andrew Ferguson issued a statement Dec. 2 joining his colleague Commissioner Melissa Holyoak in urging the agency “to investigate online platforms for unfair acts or practices relating to their opaque, unpredictable processes for banning users and censoring content.” Ferguson stipulated that “we must vigorously enforce the antitrust laws against any platforms found to be unlawfully limiting Americans’ ability to exchange ideas freely and openly.” Part of Ferguson’s antitrust push includes cracking down on unlawful, facilitated advertiser boycotts of right-leaning outlets by leftist media sentinels like NewsGuard and the World Federation of Advertisers’ Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative.
“NewsGuard ‘goes to great lengths to create the appearance of nonpartisanship and objectivity,” but it seems to give a free pass to deceptive and biased news coverage by major left-leaning outlets,” Ferguson rebuked. “NewsGuard is, of course, free to rate websites by whatever metric it wants. But the antitrust laws do not permit third parties to facilitate group boycotts among competitors.”
MRC Free Speech America released three studies of NewsGuard’s ridiculously skewed ratings system across three consecutive years consistently showing NewsGuard heavily favoring left-leaning publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, the now-defunct BuzzFeed News (which infamously published the notorious Steele Dossier) over right-leaning media.
If any outlet runs afoul of the leftist dogmas undergirding NewsGuard and GARM’s worldviews, the two outfits target that outlet’s advertising revenue by scaring away advertisers.
Ferguson didn’t mince words: “We must prosecute any unlawful collusion between online platforms, and confront advertiser boycotts which threaten competition among those platforms.”
The commissioner excoriated the censorship cartel between Big Tech platforms, government and outfits like NewsGuard as completely antithetical to the American concept of free speech:
Censorship, even if carried out transparently and honestly, is inimical to American democracy. The Commission must use the full extent of its authority to protect the free speech of all Americans. That authority includes the power to investigate collusion that may suppress competition and, in doing so, suppress free speech online. We ought to conduct such an investigation. And if our investigation reveals anti-competitive cartels that facilitate or promote censorship, we ought to bust them up.”
Ferguson is not the only agency commissioner taking NewsGuard to task. FCC Commissioner Carr recently sent a letter citing MRC research on NewsGuard to the respective CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple accusing them of “improper conduct” in silencing Americans’ exercising free speech on political, religious and scientific issues. Carr specifically called on these tech giants to surrender any documents related to their work with “the Orwellian named NewsGuard” given its history of targeting right-leaning websites by bullying their advertisers.
A warrior for free speech on a number of fronts, President-elect Donald Trump nominated Carr to chair the FCC following MRC President Brent Bozell’s endorsement.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
