NewsGuard has waved its white flag in its censorship fight against “misinformation” and “disinformation,” claiming it is eliminating these terms in favor of alternative language. The move marks the left’s latest rebranding effort following the failure of previous campaigns.
Leftist media ratings firm Editor McKenzie Sadeghi wrote in a commentary on Wednesday that the terms have become politicized and no longer serve their original purpose. Why? Sadeghi, on behalf of NewsGuard, claimed both right and left-wing actors have politicized the terms “beyond recognition.” Instead, NewsGuard will now use terms such as “provably false” to target speech it disagrees with.
MRC Free Speech America VP Dan Schneider mocked NewsGuard for attempting to rebrand its language:
This is the same crowd that rebranded global warming as “climate change,” sex change operations as “gender-affirming care,” and abortion as a “reproductive right.” Now they’re rebranding censorship terms “misinformation” and “disinformation.” Please.
— Dan Schneider (@Schneider_DC) July 11, 2025
Sadeghi defended the blatant rebrand as a harmless attempt to better inform its readers.
“At NewsGuard, we’re retiring these words as primary labels. Not because the threats they describe have vanished. To the contrary, the threats have increased. But rather because the words no longer help us explain these threats,” the company claimed in its “Reality Check” Substack.
Sadeghi added, “Language should clarify, not obfuscate. ‘Misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ have lost their precision. So, we are now employing terms, such as provably false claims, that accurately describe the content in question, rather than signal which side you're on.”
NewsGuard’s decision to abandon these controversial terms comes years after the left attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to mount a well-funded, orchestrated campaign to stifle free speech by labeling information harmful to the left’s narrative as “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
While the terms have been around for decades, they infamously gained prominence following President Donald Trump’s election in 2016. At the time, legacy media outlets and the Democratic Party claimed that Russia had mounted a disinformation campaign to help Trump win the contest and that Big Tech companies allowed such a campaign to spread.
Enter Big Tech censorship.
In response to this criticism, social media companies turned to third-party fact-checkers like Meta’s now-defunct International Fact-Checking Network, expanded their “content moderation” teams and restricted certain topics across their platforms, including immigration and gender identity. This was all done in a bid to stop the spread of so-called mis- and disinformation.
As documented by MRC Free Speech America in its exclusive CensorTrack database, hundreds of posts were censored, primarily targeting constitutionally protected speech that contradicted leftist orthodoxies.
Most famously, just weeks before the 2020 presidential election, Big Tech companies censored a New York Post exposé on the Biden laptop scandal. This story could have had damning implications for the Biden campaign, as it revealed that Biden, then a former vice president, heavily engaged in his son Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings—something he repeatedly denied.
Instead, Big Tech story throttled the story by blocking the New York Post unless it removed the article from their platforms. The impact of this censorship was substantial.
A Media Research Center poll found that 9.4 percent of Biden voters would not have voted for him had they known about the story. This shift would have tilted all swing states in favor of Trump, who was then running for reelection.
FLASHBACK: How Big Tech Censorship Interfered in the 2020 Presidential Election
Fast forward to 2025, several Big Tech CEOs have expressed their regrets for censoring the story and launched a shift away from aggressive crackdowns on misinformation and disinformation toward policies that protect free speech.
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.
