Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article mistakenly stated NewsGuard was funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. It also mistakenly referred to the “Defense Innovation Unit” as the “Defense Intelligence Unit.”
Federal government taxpayer dollars were awarded to so-called media ratings firm NewsGuard.
NewsGuard first was awarded money by the National Security Innovation Network (NSIN) of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) in the amount of “$25,000 in November 2020” for a “four-month project to help the GEC and USCYBERCOM better understand the origins, content, and spread of certain foreign disinformation campaigns,” according to a U.S. House Small Business Committee report. NewsGuard expanded its work with the federal government in 2021 when it was awarded an additional $749,387 by the U.S. Department of the Air Force under the Biden administration.
NSIN paid NewsGuard to develop a catalog of “Misinformation Fingerprints,” or trigger words and phrases to be censored. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) worked with NewsGuard “to conduct a pilot” to help refine the censorship methodologies created with NSIN “in support of the [Department of Defense’s] Cyber National Mission Force.” Together, they worked to craft a database with a “unique identifier” for each “narrative” to be catalogued.
The State and Defense departments’ work with NewsGuard began in late 2020 and continued into the Biden administration. In 2023, NewsGuard publicly listed NSIN, the Department of Defense and the State Department as its “clients,” according to the House Small Business Committee.
