FCC Commissioner announces probe into Big Tech, ‘NewsGuard’ fact-checking platform: ‘Censorship cartel’
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr addressed a letter to Big Tech CEOs this week announcing that their companies will be investigated for their role in censorship of Americans.
Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr sent a letter to the heads of the Big Tech platforms last week alerting them that their companies will be investigated for their alleged roles in mass censorship of Americans in recent years.
Carr addressed Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Apple CEO Tim Cook in an open letter calling on these companies to hand over information that will allow the FCC to understand how censorship has been conducted against the American people and prevent it going forward.
"Over the past few years, Americans have lived through an unprecedented surge in censorship. Your companies played significant roles in this improper conduct. Big Tech companies silenced Americans for doing nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights," the commissioner wrote.
Carr has since been tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to serve as FCC chairman beginning in January.
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Based on evidence put on by press reports, congressional investigations and other sources, he went on to accuse the CEOs’ companies of being part of a "censorship cartel that included not only technology and social media companies but advertising, marketing, and so-called ‘factchecking’ organizations as well as the Biden-Harris Administration itself."
Carr’s statement characterized the nature of the censorship, saying, "The relevant conduct extended from removing or blocking social media posts to labeling whole websites or apps as ‘untrustworthy’ or ‘high-risk’ in an apparent effort to suppress their information and viewpoints, including through efforts to delist them, lower their rankings, or harm their profitability."
The commissioner called out NewsGuard – an internet fact-checking platform which rates the trustworthiness of news outlets and other information shared online – as being one of the major tools of the alleged censorship cartel.
"NewsGuard combines human expertise and technology to provide data, analysis and journalism that helps enterprises and consumers identify reliable information online," its site states.
"Indeed, NewsGuard bills itself as the Internet’s arbiter of truth or, as its co-founder put it, a ‘Vaccine Against Misinformation.’ NewsGuard purports to rate the credibility of news and information outlets and tells readers and advertisers which outlets they can trust," Carr wrote.
"As the U.S. House Committee on Small Business 2024 Staff Report stated, ‘[t]hese ratings, combined with NewsGuard’s vast partnerships in the advertising industry, select winners and losers in the news media space,’" he added, noting that NewsGuard partners with Google, Apple and Microsoft’s web browsers to evaluate content.
He then detailed areas where NewsGuard has allegedly contributed to censorship, stating, "For one, reports indicate that NewsGuard has consistently rated official propaganda from the Communist Party of China as more credible than American publications. For another, NewsGuard aggressively fact checked and penalized websites that reported on the COVID-lab leak theory."
Carr continued, "For still another, the Small Business Committee and multiple Media Research Center studies detail numerous instances where NewsGuard apparently does not apply its own rating system in an even-handed manner."
Carr also further challenged NewsGuard’s credibility by adding that one person on its advisory board signed the "now infamous October 2020 letter from former intelligence community officials that flamed the false claim that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation."
NewsGuard is currently being investigated by the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability over its effects on the First Amendment. He requested the tech CEOs provide him with specific information for the FCC’s own investigation into NewsGuard’s alleged censorship.
NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz issued a lengthy statement to Fox News Digital saying the letter sent by Carr relied on "false reports" and denied NewsGuard favored censorship.
"NewsGuard was founded in 2018 explicitly as an alternative to government censorship or to continuing to rely on social media platforms’ secret algorithms for rating news sources. We take the opposite approach: We apply nine transparent and apolitical criteria for rating news websites and our ratings are disclosed," he said.
"Our work does not involve any censorship or blocking of speech at all. Instead of blocking information, we provide users with apolitical reliability analysis. Instead of censorship, we provide users with more information -- reliability ratings of news publishers based on apolitical criteria and a transparent journalistic process -- so that each user can make informed decisions about which information to trust."
He added NewsGuard uses its ratings to target more advertising toward news, "not to block ads," and that there "are more conservative websites on our advertising target list than liberal sites." Responding to the Hunter Biden case, he said NewsGuard had never asserted the laptop was a Russian operation as some liberal sites did, and it had in fact criticized outlets that peddled that claim.
"We note that our journalism is itself speech protected by the First Amendment, and we're concerned to see a government official using the powers of his office, however unwittingly, to rely on false claims," Crovitz said.
A Google spokesperson said the company didn't use NewsGuard services in its products.
"We do not use NewsGuard services in our products and our business model depends on connecting people to a wide range of perspectives and voices," Google Spokesperson José Castañeda told Fox News Digital.
Fox News Digital reached out to Meta, Microsoft and Apple for comment.
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