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Tag: fact checkers
NewsGuard denies being government funded after Matt Taibbi’s Twitter Files expose
Matt Taibbi appeared before the new congressional Weaponization of Government Committee on Thursday and said the for-profit organization NewsGuard, an organization aimed at “combating misinformation,” according to their website, was “US government funded.”
According to the Washington Examiner, “In a lengthy email to @mtaibbi on Friday morning, Newsguard’s CEO Gordon Crovitz refuted that the purported disinformation tracker is ‘U.S. government funded.’ In 2021, the Department of Defense awarded $749,387 to Newsguard.”
Taibbi also tweeted out another round of the Twitter files on Thursday, detailing what he dubbed a “Censorship-Industrial Complex” moving within Twitter, government agencies, establishment media, and mostly non-profit organizations all of whom ideologically align in censorship efforts and named NewsGuard as funded by the Department of Defense.
Our track record is pretty good…
NewsGuard Misinfo Watchdog: Contracts with DOD, WHO, Pfizer, Microsoft and AFT
NewsGuard is a self-appointed misinformation watchdog. It seems to be just one more way Americans are not allowed to think for themselves. Co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz claim it is the “librarian for the internet.” Set up specifically to rate online journalistic integrity, Brill states NewsGuard provides services that “explain to people something about the reliability and trustworthiness and background of those who are feeding them the news.” Eric Effron is the organization’s Editorial Director.
Brill is a Yale graduate and lawyer who has authored multiple best-selling books and was, among other things, CEO of Verified Identity Pass, Inc., the first U.S. biometric Voluntary Credentialing Program that went bankrupt in 2009. It was the parent company of CLEAR which went back online in 2010 and then went public in 2021.
According to MintPressNews, “Crovitz held a number of positions at Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, eventually becoming executive vice president of the former and the publisher of the latter before both were sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in 2007. He is also a board member of Business Insider, which has received over $30 million from Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos in recent years.”
Crovitz’s alliances might account for the organization’s favorable 100 ratings for WSJ and the Washington Post. He is also a contributor “to books published by the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation,” which are also favorably rated by NewsGuard.
George Soros Funds Global ‘Fact Checking’ Empire
Over the past few years, a cottage industry of “fact checkers” and “misinformation” experts has emerged to advance the left’s mission of silencing dissent to its agenda around the world. Analysis of the funding of these organizations leads back to a familiar figure: left-wing billionaire George Soros.
The New York Post broke down the trail of Soros dollars linking a global network of organizations intent on suppressing and discrediting conservative voices online.
Via the New York Post:
Later in the year, heading into the midterms, in an open letter signed by 11 other leftist groups, the Soros-funded Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights called on Big Tech CEOs to take “immediate” action to spread so-called “voting disinformation” to “help prevent the undermining” of democracy. The signatories had received a combined $30.3 million from Soros in just a four-year period.
As the Hungarian publication Remix revealed, of the 11 Facebook-approved fact checking organizations for Central and Eastern Europe, eight were funded by Soros. As is the case for the US, these fact checking groups are largely critical of the political right.
One project of the Poynter Institute specifically, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), was launched in 2015 with its initial funding coming from the National Endowment for Democracy (backed by the US State Department), the Omidyar Network, Google, Facebook, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
“Fact checking” is an important element in the left’s online censorship machine, giving social media companies a politically neutral pretext so censor conservative viewpoints.
Who Determines What’s ‘Disinformation’?
Why are we being bombarded by fact-checks and “anti-disinformation” efforts in our timeline scrolls? When reading the news, we too often find that so-called experts are behind whatever claim media professionals make, no matter how outlandish or disconnected from reality such claims may be.
Through his concept and exploration of spectacle, a totalizing, negating force over our lives that results in what is really “unlife,” French Philosopher Guy Debord’s famous Society of the Spectacle (1967) and his follow-up booklet, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), provide insights into these and related phenomena.
When it comes to “fact-checks” and “experts,” Debord is clear: in a society subjugated by the economy, where “everything that was once directly lived has faded into representation,” such professionals do not exist to provide us the truth — they exist to serve the state and media through lies and distortions spun into what appears as true. If the “experts” lose influence, it will be because the public learns and articulates that their job is to systematically lie.
“Disinformation” appears as one of the biggest bogeymen in today’s increasingly online world. Governments warn of the dangers it apparently poses to society and democracy, and mainstream media organizations in turn direct resources to counter-disinformation and to fact-checking. In the name of “being informed,” people cannot often go online without being bombarded by fact-checks or warnings about what content to consume and share with their social and professional networks.
Another FAKE FACT-CHECKER Identified – Politifact’s Jeff Cercone “Fact-Checks” on COVID Despite Zero Credentials
Another fake “fact-checker” has been identified. Politifact’s Jeff Cercone joins the army of the biased and unqualified in telling us what the truth is and what it is not.
The “fact-checker” scheme invented by the far-left is a means to discredit the truth. Fake “fact-checkers” are used to proclaim that the truth is a lie. This is an effort to keep the American people in the dark about the reality of the world around them.
The left feels that if they discredit the truth overwhelmingly, then Americans will begin to believe that boys are girls, kids should be taught porn in grade schools, there is global warming, and Joe Biden won the 2020 Election.
A Dem-Linked Dark Money Network Is Quietly Funding The ‘Misinformation’ Research Industry
Several funds managed by Arabella Advisors, a Democrat-linked consultant firm, are quietly bankrolling research by universities and non-profits into how online “misinformation” and “disinformation” spreads, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of the networks’ grants.
Arabella Advisors, run by former Bill Clinton official Eric Kessler, manages certain administrative, legal and philanthropic functions of several non-profits including the Sixteen Thirty Fund, Hopewell Fund, North Fund and New Venture Fund, which donate to a variety of left-leaning groups, causes and Democratic candidates, according to tax filings and statements on the funds’ and Arabella’s websites. Several funds within the network are also sponsoring research into the effects of, and how best to mitigate, misinformation and disinformation, according to a DCNF review of public grants.
Many of the Arabella-funded research projects cite conservatives predominantly as purveyors of misinformation, with several projects recommending solutions to mitigate the spread of misinformation, including censorship.
The New Venture Fund sponsored a project in March called “The True Costs of Misinformation” at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, led by the center’s research director Joan Donovan, that sought to study the impacts of online misinformation, particularly on “vulnerable communities,” according to the project’s description. The project included a workshop featuring several panels on different topics related to the alleged impacts of misinformation.
We’ve all met them…
Google, YouTube spend MILLIONS to launch Global Fact Check Fund
On Tuesday, Google and YouTube announced that they will be providing a $13.2 million grant to the nonprofit Poynter Institute’s International Fact Checking Network with the goal of launching a new “Global Fact Check Fund,” set to launch in early 2023.
The move, which marks the companies’ largest fact-checking grant to date, comes as they continue to ramp up their fight against “misinformation” online.
According to Google and YouTube, the grant will “support [the Poynter Institute’s] network of 135 fact-checking organizations from 65 countries covering over 80 languages.”
The companies justified their decision by noting that “helping people to identify misinformation is a global challenge.”
“The Global Fact Check Fund,” they explained, “will help fact-checkers to scale existing operations or launch new ones that elevate information, uplift credible sources and reduce the harm of mis- and disinformation around the globe.”
Hellbound and Down 
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