WHO moves forward with plans to target “misinformation” and “disinformation” under international law

The global health agency claims that misinformation and disinformation undermined "compliance with governmental or WHO guidance."

The global unelected health agency, the World Health Organization (WHO) is marching forward with its plans to make amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005) which would give it new far-reaching powers to counter “misinformation and disinformation.”

The plans to amend the International Health Regulations (IHR) were set in motion in January last year when the Biden administration quietly proposed sweeping changes to the IHR.

Currently, the IHR are a legally binding instrument under international law. They require 196 countries to build capabilities to detect and report potential public health emergencies worldwide and respond swiftly to a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) whenever it’s declared by the WHO.

The amendments being pushed by the Biden administration sought to increase the WHO’s powers to declare “potential” health emergencies and empower the WHO to develop new global surveillance and data-sharing mechanisms.

But after the Biden administration sent its proposals, other member states submitted their own proposed amendments to the IHR. To date, 307 proposed amendments have been submitted. These proposed amendments go beyond the scope of the Biden administration’s original suggestions and seek to give the WHO additional powers to counter so-called misinformation and disinformation.

In a recent WHO meeting, that began on February 20 and ended on February 24, a working group of WHO representatives completed their reading of the proposed amendments to the IHR, agreed on the next steps for more in-depth negotiations, and planned for their next meeting which will begin on April 17 and end on April 20. A provisional timeline was also published that suggests the amendments will be finalized by May 2024.

We obtained a copy of the provisional timeline for you here.

How these proposed IHR amendments expand the WHO’s powers

1. New provisions that apply to “potential” health emergencies and health risks

The existing IHR allow the WHO Director-General to declare a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) which is currently defined as (link): “An extraordinary event which is determined to constitute a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a coordinated international response.”

They’re also restricted in their scope. Specifically, the purpose and scope of the current IHR is to “prevent, protect against, control and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease in ways that are commensurate with and restricted to public health risks.”

But these proposed amendments broaden the purview of the IHR by adding the word “potential” to several key sections. The amendments give the WHO Director-General the power to declare a “potential or actual” PHEIC and expand the scope of the IHR to include “all risks with a potential to impact public health.”

2. New powers to declare health emergencies

Currently, health emergencies can only be declared by the WHO Director-General and these declarations have to follow the PHEIC criteria. These proposed amendments allow the WHO to declare new types of health emergencies, give WHO Regional Directors powers to declare some types of health emergencies, and allow the WHO to issue new types of health alerts.

Specifically, the proposed amendments give the Director-General new powers to issue an “intermediate public health alert” to any country in response to events that don’t meet the PHEIC criteria, allow Regional Directors to declare a “public health emergency of regional concern” (PHERC), and allow Regional Directors to issue an “intermediate health alert.”

3. New provision recognizing the WHO as the “coordinating authority” during a PHEIC

Not only do these proposed amendments give the WHO new powers to declare health emergencies but they also recognize the WHO “as the guidance and coordinating authority of international public health response” during a PHEIC.

As part of this provision, all of the WHO’s member states agree to “follow WHO’s recommendations in their international public health response.”

The WHO’s plans to counter misinformation and disinformation under the IHR

The WHO already has significant influence when it comes to censoring online content that it deems to be misinformation or disinformation. It has partnerships with YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia. YouTube alone has censored more than 800,000 videos under a policy that prohibits going against the WHO.

But with these proposed amendments and the increased powers that they bring, the WHO is planning to further expand its influence in this area.

The proposed amendments direct the WHO to strengthen its capacities to “counter misinformation and disinformation” and build the capacities of member states to gain “leverage of communication channels to communicate the risk, countering misinformation and dis-information.”

Additionally, the proposed amendments empower the WHO to strengthen its capacity to “co-ordinate with “UN [United Nations] agencies, academia, non-state actors and representatives of society.”

We obtained a copy of the full list of proposed amendments to the IHR for you here.

We obtained an article-by-article compilation of the proposed amendments to the IHR for you here.

This push to grant an unelected global health agency new powers to counter misinformation and disinformation follows many people being accused of spreading misinformation and censored during the pandemic when they made truthful statements, such as stating that vaccinated people can spread Covid (a claim that authorities are now admitting is true).

Despite authorities now admitting that the vaccinated can spread Covid, the WHO has branded “vaccine hesitancy and the spread of misinformation” as hurdles that need to be tackled and even suggested that “anti-vaccine activism” is deadlier than “global terrorism.”

And in a report that it published alongside these proposed amendments to the IHR, the WHO continued to express its disdain for content that it deems to be misinformation or disinformation. The unelected global health agency claimed that misinformation and disinformation “hindered a meaningful public health response” during Covid and complained that it can “undermine public trust in health agencies and impede public confidence in, and compliance with, governmental or WHO guidance.”

The WHO also called for a “balance between ensuring more accurate scientific information on one hand and freedom of speech and the press on the other” in the report.

We obtained a copy of this report for you here.

While the WHO has been very vocal about the purported harms of misinformation and disinformation as it creeps closer to getting new powers to target this content, the WHO itself pushed one of the most infamous pieces of misleading content during the early stage of the pandemic when it repeated China’s claims that it had found “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” of the coronavirus.”

Some politicians have opposed the proposed amendments to the IHR but this opposition has yet to prevent the WHO from moving forward with its provisional timeline of finalizing the amendments by May 2024.

The WHO has the authority to adopt these proposed amendments under Article 21 of the WHO Constitution. After the amendments are finalized, they’ll come into force for all member states “after due notice has been given of their adoption” by the World Health Assembly (WHA), the decision-making body of the WHO, unless member states reject them within a specified period. This specified period for these proposed amendments to the IHR is six months.

The WHO Constitution doesn’t specify how many votes are required to adopt amendments to regulations. However, according to SWP Berlin, a research institute that advises political decision-makers on foreign and security policy, WHO regulations require a lower voting threshold than conventions (which require a two-thirds majority vote).

Unlike the usual lawmaking process in democratic countries, where elected officials vote on the laws that apply to their citizens, most of the votes that determine whether a legally binding WHO convention or regulation applies to a country are cast by representatives from other countries. And many of the representatives casting these votes are unelected diplomats who can’t be voted out at the ballot box and often keep their position when the ruling party changes.

Related: How the term “misinformation” was weaponized as an online censorship tool amid the coronavirus pandemic

These proposed amendments to the IHR are just one of the pending changes that could give the WHO greater sway over online content. The WHO is currently negotiating the zero draft of its international pandemic treaty which targets misinformation and disinformation. Like with the IHR, the WHO intends to finalize the international pandemic treaty by May 2024.

And the WHO getting a potential increase in censorship powers is just one of the implications of these proposed amendments to the IHR and the international pandemic treaty being finalized. Both of these measures also push for increased surveillance powers and the proposed amendments to the IHR lay out a roadmap for international vaccine passports.

 

The FDA’s Paxlovid Pandemonium

David Gortler

By David Gortler   February 27, 2023   Government, Policy   8 minute read

Back in August of 2022, I wrote a piece on Pfizer’s Paxlovid approval. I talked about how the White House awarded Pfizer billions of taxpayer dollars before producing conclusive findings of safety or efficacy to the FDA. 

In approving Paxlovid, the Biden White House and the FDA also seemed to deliberately ignore hundreds of clinical trials conducted on hundreds of thousands of patients detailing the established safety and efficacy of IVM and HCQ.  

Like many other things the Biden White House implements, they force through a multitude of ideas, concepts and public health mandates which “seem” like they could work, but without the requisite conclusive scientifically obtained evidence that they will work.  

On top of that, the White House doesn’t seem interested in learning.  They repeat their mistakes in establishing America’s policies time and time again.  Emergencies or not; there is no excuse for foregoing the scientific method (or using poor testing methodologies) thereby placing the Americans at risk – especially when it comes to public health.  

Paxlovid is just one of dozens of examples of public health mendacity (too many to list here) pushed by the chaotic Biden White House and its ethically pliant partisan marionettes at the FDA. In the case of Paxlovid, not only was evidence of failure deliberately ignored; prospective testing methodologies were altered mid-trial to favor a positive outcome when it became apparent that the Paxlovid trial results would not meet their original endpoints.  In fact, Pfizer had already opted to stop its Paxlovid trial, but then changed their minds after the FDA intervened via the White House.  

Even worse:  Its not the first time the FDA has forsaken science under Biden (I warned this would be a repeating theme in early 2021).  Paxlovid was a failure, but the White House had foolishly already paid Pfizer $5.3 Billion in advance.  Rather than admit failure and epic waste, the FDA then stepped in and with zero transparency, altered the established clinical trial parameters mid-trial to make Paxlovid’s findings seem better than they were. Pfizer then completed the trial, declared Paxlovid a success and the White House doubled-down on its $5.3 Billion investment, spending a sickening total of $10.6 Billion on Paxlovid.  

That moral and scientific decision was approved by America’s insufferable, self-righteous taxpayer-funded civil servants who proclaim the left is “the party of science” and celebrated that when Biden was elected, “the adults are back in charge.”  

“Following the science” is their tired jingle, but not their actual policy.  

Even more outrageous were the number of nurses, pharmacists and physicians who witnessed – and fully recognized the scientific misconduct – but remained (and continue to remain) silent, inexplicably choosing to follow clinical recommendations from politicians, bureaucratic hospital administrators, mainstream news or social media.  It is impossible to overstate the cowardliness, conformism and malpractice of these professionals in betraying their oaths to protect patients.  

In reality, Americans still don’t have answers form the White House, FDA or any other HHS officials on: 

1) The White House’s logic of purchasing $10.6 Billion of Paxlovid, and without concrete evidence of safety and effectiveness;

2) How many unused Paxlovid doses remain that will ultimately expire and be thrown away due to non-use, milder disease making it epidemiologically unnecessary;

3) Disclosure of the real-world incidence of “rebound” Paxlovid infections (which would be hard for drug safety epidemiologists to uncover because the White House, Pfizer and FDA have every reason in the world to under-report it, plus “rebound” is not an official [MedDRA] adverse event reporting term);

4) The current/historical prescribing and rates and other Paxlovid adverse event updates;

5) A full disclosure of communications with Pfizer, the White House and FDA officials with a scientifically legitimate explanation of why altered critical parameters of the Paxlovid were made mid-trial and in lieu of starting a completely new trial;  

6) An official pharmacologic, mechanistic explanation of “Paxlovid rebound” ;

7) Why the Paxlovid trial was compared to placebo only, and had no IVM / HCQ / other comparator arms.

The original article from August 2022 is reprinted below.

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Shortly after President Joe Biden touted his recovery from Covid last week, he once again tested positive for the virus, in a rebound case that is often associated with the drug Paxlovid, which Biden was taking.

Countless Americans who have taken Pfizer’s Paxlovid following a Covid infection have experienced what everyone is calling “rebound Covid.” Rebound Covid is a recurrence of the virus that occurs in a person who has already recovered from Covid, many times shortly after completing Paxlovid.  

What does it mean?

Clinical scientists are offering all kinds of different theories, but no definitive explanations for the “rebound” Paxlovid phenomenon. It’s a mystery and regardless of what it is, it can’t be good.  

Why Make High-Risk Patients Sick Twice?

Rebound Covid post-Paxlovid raises a critical public health and drug safety concern. According to the NIH, only high-risk populations are supposed to get Paxlovid, but taking Paxlovid sometimes opens those same high-risk patients to a rebound infection with Covid. In some cases, the rebound Covid symptoms are worse, placing the same high-risk patients in more severe danger.  

One doesn’t need to be an FDA expert to know that having  high-risk patients get sick twice is worse than once.  

Why is Biden still advocating for Paxlovid’s use, as recently as last week? Its because the White House doesn’t have a political option. It must either a) admit failure or b) ignore public health.  The White House has foolishly chose to pay Pfizer $10.6 billion for Paxlovid, based on a highly preliminary “pilot study” showing nearly 90 percent effectiveness which later dissolved into its study failing and being voluntarily discontinued by Pfizer prior to its completion. 

Paxlovid failed its trial endpoints when compared to a placebo group. Perhaps the Biden White House didn’t realize that informal preliminary pilot studies are never conclusive and “results” need confirmation with a formal clinical trial and account for variables like mutations. Regardless, the White House did not wait until the formal trial was complete before committing $10.6 billion in taxpayer dollars. 

Spending Billions on a Questionable Drug

The White House’s actions are inexcusable. Not only do they refuse to acknowledge that the drug was a failure and that they had prematurely and inappropriately spent a vast fortune on something ineffective and potentially dangerous, but they continue to promote Paxlovid’s use! 

Rather than protecting patients, the White House is choosing to sacrifice the well-being of at-risk patients.

The actual rate of Paxlovid rebound is hard to know. First, Americans were told it was “rare,” less than 1 percent. Then we were told it was 5.4 percent, then 10 percent. On July 30, 2022, one CNN medical analyst and professor at George Washington Universitystated that with the newest Covid strain it is “likely 20-40 percent or even higher.” Anecdotal reports from social media make it seem that a huge percentage of people who have taken Paxlovid have rebounded.  

The silence of the CDC, FDA, NIH, and Dr. Fauci (who himself had a rebound case after taking Paxlovid) is deafening, but also predictable.  

Similar to Vaccines and Boosters

In case this feels familiar, that’s because it is. Americans have seen the exact same thing before regarding Covid-19 vaccine adverse effects. While the federal government scolded Americans for not getting vaccines and boosters, they simultaneously remained silent on adverse events and even complacent in suppressing them.  

Even if Paxlovid was effective, do patients need it? At this point, the same question goes for Covid-19 vaccines and boosters. The dominant variants today typically produce a milder infection; most people get minimal to moderate cold-like symptoms from Covid infections whether vaccinated or not.  

It’s also telling that many Americans aren’t interested in boosters. If they had been shown to work, people would be taking them — but they haven’t, so people aren’t. In the U.S. alone, the government has been forced to throw out more than 82 million vaccine/booster doses, yet Americans aren’t dropping dead everywhere from Covid-19. Even leftist academic centers can’t hide objective epidemiological evidence coming out of hospitals in recent months that illustrate record lows in Covid-19-related hospital ICU admissions.

Digging Their Hole Deeper

Despite all of that, the White House is still endlessly seeking to purchase more vaccines. By July 29, the White House had committed to purchasing a total of 171 million Covid-19 vaccine doses for the new omicron mutations of Covid-19, despite lacking trial evidence of safety or efficacy — e.g., exactly like they did with Paxlovid!  

The combination of promoting endless boosters of a vaccine that fails to prevent infection or transmission, along with promoting Pfizer’s Paxlovid despite its ineffectiveness and mysterious “rebound” pharmacology, makes me wonder about something that I have thought about for a long time, especially as a former senior FDA official: Is there some sort of unholy union between the FDA, Pfizer, and the Biden White House? 

Pfizer spends millions in lobbying and campaign contributions. Its revolving doorwith government health agencies is concerning. Would the Biden White House dare place Americans’ public health at risk in the name of politics? I pray the answer is no and also hope that I am wrong, perhaps missing part of the story, but a compelling amount of information points to my suspicions being accurate.  

The White House seems eager to funnel fortunes to Big Pharma for unproven, and possibly unsafe or unneeded, drugs. Americans should very carefully consider what they are hearing from the White House, its officials, and all federal alphabet agencies about the Paxlovid “wonder drug.”  

Reprinted from The Federalist 

Author

• Dr. David Gortler, a 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is a pharmacologist, pharmacist, research scientist and a former member of the FDA Senior Executive Leadership Team who served as senior advisor to the FDA Commissioner on matters of: FDA regulatory affairs, drug safety and FDA science policy. He is a former Yale University and Georgetown University didactic professor of pharmacology and biotechnology, with over a decade of academic pedagogy and bench research, as part of his nearly two decades of experience in drug development. He also serves as a scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center

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Calling the 2014 Overthrow of Ukraine’s Yanukovych a “U.S. Coup” Is True, and Extremely Important.

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On February 25th, Elon Musk tweeted “That election was arguably dodgy, but no question that there was indeed a coup.” By “That election,” he was referring to Viktor Yanukovych’s having won the Presidency of Ukraine in an election about which even the British Guardian newspaper had headlined on 8 February 2010, “Yanukovych set to become president as observers say Ukraine election was fair”, and it made clear that even Western international observers there were testifying to the authenticity of that electoral win by Yanukovych, such as by its reporting that, “Observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said there were no indications of serious fraud and described the vote as an ‘impressive display’ of democracy.” However, Elon Musk, without citing any evidence, was now saying otherwise: that Yanukovych’s win had been “arguably dodgy” — and (despite that tweet) he provided no argument at all to back up that ‘arguably’ allegation.

Only fools cite tweets that have no links to any evidence, as being evidence for anything other than that the tweeter had made that given assertion. As a general rule, tweets are the least-reliable source of information. Certainly Musk’s tweet was. However, he also said there that there was “no question that there was indeed a coup.” 

Anyone who has at all followed the evidence on that matter knows that it unquestionably WAS a coup that overthrew Yanukovych in February 2014;and even the head of the “private-CIA” firm Stratfor said on 19 December 2014 that the overthrow of Yanukovych that had occurred then was “the most blatant coup in history.”It was that, because the evidence that it was is not only this smoking gun that it was a U.S.coup, but because there was plenty more of high quality evidence and all of it showed the same thing: it was a coup by (or “on behalf of”) the Obama Administration. (Obama and his team, and all ‘allied’ countries, however, and all of the Western news-media, called it instead a ‘democratic revolution’. This is George Orwell’s 1984made real. It’s not real history, but real deceit.)

The fools who follow Musk’s opinions should know that he himself thinks that coups are just fine: when Elon Musk received on 24 July 2020 a tweet from an “Armani” saying, “You know what wasnt in the best interest of people? the U.S. government organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there [for Tesla cars’ batteries].” Later that day, Musk replied:

“We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”

He likes coups that profit himself personally, but apparently there are some coups that he disfavors — and he doesn’t ever explain (or at least not honestly) why. Maybe, for twitter-followers, “why” just isn’t an interesting question? (Maybe that’s why they use social media — instead of articles like this, that link to their primary sources — to ‘know’ what’s ‘going on’ in ‘the news’?)

Musk’s stupid tweet about Ukraine was likewise in response to something that one of his followers had tweeted: He was responding to one of his twitter followers, “KanekoaTheGreat” having tweetedquoting Professor John Mearsheimer’s having said in the September/October 2014 issue of America’s most prestigious — and strongly pro-U.S.-empire or “neoconservative” or pro-Military-Industrial-Complex — Foreign Affairs magazine, “For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president—which he rightly labeled a “coup”—was the final straw.” Ultimately, that’s what Musk was responding to — not the evidence, but instead the opinion there, in that prestigious, overwhelmingly pro-U.S.-coups and empire, magazine, from (as it turns out) a professor who was arguing that the coup had been merely (and only) a mistake:

On February 17th, under the headline “John Mearsheimer’s Misrepresentations In Order To Be Allowed Space On U.S. Propaganda-Media (i.e., U.S. ‘News’-Media)”, I had pointed out numerous distortions of the historical record regarding that coup — such as his alleging it to have been due to a “flawed view” (not a vicious, or even just a “false” view, but merely “flawed” — and he doesn’t so much as hint at in what way “flawed”) including “such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy,” which “went awry in Ukraine [and, again, he doesn’t hint at in what way ‘awry’],” and on and on — as-if it weren’t what it actuallhy WAS: which was the U.S. Government’s bipartisan neoconservative obsession to trap Russia’s Government, to checkmate it, into its being forced to yield, finally and inexorably, to the control by the U.S. Government. That’s imperialism — and there wasn’t a word about it — except one passing reference, which was 180 degrees in the false direction: against actually the victim-country, NOT against the aggressor:

In September 2013, Gershman wrote in The Washington Post, “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.” He added: “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

And that distractionary and deceptive reference is to Russia’s ‘imperialism’, NOT to America’s own authentic hyper-imperialism that Russia is now responding to(and which imperialism entails a military budget that now (including what’s hidden in non-‘Defense’-Department agencies but is still for military purposes) is half of the entire world’s military spending, and it pays for 900 foreign military bases and much more that is counterproductive if it has any real impact at all on protecting U.S. national security. (It’s not “the Defense Department”; it is “the AggressionDepartment.”)

This is the hidden reality: and neither Musk nor Mearsheimer, nor any other mouthpiece of the U.S. Establishment or the “Deep State” lets its audience in on it — and on the EVIDENCE that this IS the reality.

The U.S. coup against and that grabbed Ukraine was a very intentional, and very evil — not at all unintentional or ‘by mistake’ — U.S. coup, and Putin is being villainized in U.S.-and-allied media for finally responding to it in Russia’s case. Not ONLY was it “a coup” but it was a U.S. coup, and it was by careful and evil design, no mere (nor Mearsheimer) ‘error’.

This is — on steroids — the 1962 Cuban-Missile-Crisis in reverse: Ukraine is only a 300-mile or five-minute missile-flying-time distance away from The Kremlin and decapitation of Russia’s ability to fire-off its retaliatory weapons (within less than five minutes) against a U.S. blitz-attack. Russia needs to prevent that.

“The West” — including all of NATO — are 100% the aggressors in this matter. And that fact is unmentionable in U.S.-and-allied media.

To top it all off: on February 25th, another budding U.S. politician, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, is apparently entering the U.S. Presidential primaries campaiging for the Republican (traditional fascist) nomination, by tweeting:

The main thing should be the main thing: focus on China. China wants the Ukraine war to last as long as possible to deplete Western military capacity before invading Taiwan. It’s working: we think we *look* stronger by helping Ukraine, but we actually *become* weaker vs. China.

Perhaps in foreign affairs, while the Democrats (liberal fascists) will be campaigning for war against Russia to precede war against China, the Republicans (conservative fascists) will be campaigning for war against China to precede war against Russia. It’ll be a contest about which ‘enemy’ to hate first. Either way, the owners of mega-corporations such as Lockheed Martin and ExxonMobil will be beaming. They’re the realconstituency in this ‘democracy’.

It’s like: Will the flavor be chocolate, or will it be vanilla? Either way, it’ll be loaded with sugar, artificial flavoring, and artificial coloring, and will fatten you, and rot your teeth, just the same, no matter how different the taste is. And those are the only two ‘choices’. That’s all the billionaires are offering, in the political market. Truth isn’t anywhere on the menu, from either Party.

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This article was originally published on The Duran.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

 

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 helda 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 millionfrom Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos in recent years.”

Crovitz’s alliances might account for the organization’s favorable 100 ratings for WSJand the Washington Post. He is also a contributor “to books published by the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation,” which are also favorably ratedby NewsGuard.

Notable NewsGuard Partnerships

NewsGuard has partnered with Microsoft, Pfizer, the Department of Defense with a 2021 $749,387 one-year contract, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the WHO using NewsGuard’s trademark “new Misinformation Fingerprints” analyst and AI cataloging tool. NewsGuard’s other products include NewsGuard, HealthGuard, and BrandGuard—which help marketers concerned about their brand safety.

NewsGuard mentions its partnership with the WHO in August 2020 and discusses its Misinformation Fingerprints cataloging tool. The tool is essentially a database with a “unique identifier for each hoax that, when combined with the platforms’ machine learning tools, will allow platforms to identify each hoax across the entirety of their platforms.” NewsGuard describes Misinformation Fingerprints as an “extraction and cataloging” tool. It  provides “data seeds for existing AI/Social Listening tools to trace false claims across the internet and social media or can be used by human analysts to understand mis- and disinformation risks.”

NewsGuard was also a signatory in 2021 to the Code of Practice on Disinformation for the European Commission. Commissioner statements from the May 2021 announcement are below:

European Commission Statements

Microsoft was the first signatory to “provide NewsGuard ratings and labels to its users as a “middleware solution” for empowering consumers.” Microsoft licensed NewsGuard ratings and labels. They are “free of charge” to users of the Edge browser.

NewsGuard Wins Contest Run by Pentagon and DoD in 2020

NewsGuard won a 2020 contest run by the “Pentagon and Department of State to offer solutions to hoaxes related to the COVID-19 pandemic.” The contest focused specifically on the “pre-bunking” of internet hoaxes. NewsGuard was also “a winner of the Countering Disinformation Challenge, a contest offered jointly by the State Department and the Department of Defense (DoD) as a part of the DoD’s National Security Innovation Network (NSIN).” NSIN is a “government program office within the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OSD (R&E)) that collaborates with major universities and the venture community to develop solutions that drive national security innovation.”

NewsGuard equips “defense and military personnel” with the tools to fight disinformation from foreign and domestic adversaries “in real-time.”

NewsGuard/DOD/Mil/

Per the NewsGuard press release:

“As a winner, NewsGuard will receive $25,000 to conduct a pilot and will work with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center to scope and develop a test in support of the DoD’s Cyber National Mission Force. Two other companies, PeakMetrics, which offers a dashboard for tracking mentions of a topic across multiple media channels, and Omelas, which offers a product for visually mapping online information, were also named winners of the contest.”

Notably, the tech company Omelas focuses on the “actions of overt state and nonstate actors” who exert “malicious influence on the web.” Omelas regularly contributes with speeches and written submissions to influential global organizations and domestic institutions like UChicago’s Data and Democracy initiative and the UChicago Center for Effective Government, attended by the likes of Tiana Epps-Johnson with CTCL.

Teachers’ Union Signs Contract with NewsGuard in 2022

The American Federation of Teachers, with its 1.7 million members, announced its “pathbreaking” partnership with NewsGuard in January 2022 with the rollout of the “free, real-time traffic light news ratings,” a “crucial news literacy tool” for students nationwide. The announcement coincided with National News Literacy Week. They released this video on the dangers of misinformation at the time of the announcement:

Touted as a “game-changer for teachers and families drowning in an ocean of online dishonesty,” a “licensed copy of NewsGuard’s browser extension” would help students “separate fact from fiction, as we help them develop their critical-thinking and analytical skills.” AFT President Randi Weingarten gave NewsGuard glowing reviews:

“NewsGuard is a great tool in this regard. It is a beacon of clarity to expose the dark depths of the internet and uplift those outlets committed to truth and honesty rather than falsehoods and fabrications. This historic deal will not only help us steer clear of increasingly fetid waters—it will provide a valuable lesson in media literacy and a discussion point for teachers in class on what can and can’t be trusted.”

NewsGuard’s 2022 Social Impact Report

NewsGuard issued its first “social impact report” in 2022. The report championed NewsGuard’s provision of tools that would promote “online safety for readers, brands, and democracies.” Its CEOs proudly state a mission to fight false claims of “Nazis running Ukraine’s government and Americans running bioweapons labs in Ukraine,” COVID-19 misinformation, and misinformation surrounding the mid-term elections.

According to the report, “more than 938,200 people were exposed to COVID-19 vaccine myths between Oct. 2021-Feb. 2022 on social media.” The report also reveals NewsGuard’s exposure of “pink slime sites pushing Democratic propaganda in battleground states ahead of the midterm elections.”

What are NewsGuard’s Stated Standards and Procedures?

The NewsGuard Dashboard “helps clients access NewsGuard’s database of News Reliability Ratings and Misinformation Fingerprints through a powerful, searchable web interface purpose-built for use by businesses seeking to identify and mitigate risks from misinformation and disinformation. Users can browse NewsGuard’s ratings, get alerts about changes in the news and information environment, and stay on top of emerging false narratives and trends.”

The site issues “stoplight red/green journalistic ratings” for news sources. Influence watch describes NewsGuard as a “web browser extension that rates the trustworthiness of online news sites based on nine criteria, providing a trust score between 0 and 100.” Nine basic “apolitical criteria” for journalistic practice are outlined on the NewsGuard website. The criteria are listed in order of importance and weighted accordingly. Satire sites, platforms, and news aggregators “are given separate designations and are not scored using the nine criteria.” The nine criteria and standards for credibility are as follows:

• Does not repeatedly publish false content (22 Points)
• Gathers and presents information responsibly (18 Points)
• Regularly corrects or clarifies errors (12.5 Points)
• Handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly (12.5 Points)
• Avoids deceptive headlines (10 Points)
• Website discloses ownership and financing (7.5 Points)
• Clearly labels advertising (7.5 Points)
• Reveals who’s in charge, including possible conflicts of interest (5 Points)
• The site provides the names of content creators, along with either contact or biographical information (5 Points)

NewsGuard Ratings/0-100

According to the website, NewsGuard substantiates the basis for its ratings with “evidence and examples to back up its assessments, includ[ing] any relevant comments from the publisher, and indicat[ing] the history of the sites’ ratings.” NewsGuard employs “a team of journalists and experienced editors” who make an effort to contact publishers who might “fail” specific criteria before a rating or an updated rating is published, “ensuring a publisher[‘s] ability to reply.” NewsGuard has recently dropped its stoplight rating system and now uses its “nutrition label” exclusively.

Are Conservatives Being Targeted by NewsGuard?

According to a series of email exchangesmade public by the Conservative organization PragerU, Newsguard targets conservative organizations unfairly. NewsMax, Dave Rubin, and Harmeet Dhillon also allege having been targeted by NewsGuard. Rubin says the service sums up “so much of what is wrong right now in American culture relative to big tech and government.”

NewsGuard claimed PragerU was spreading “misleading content” on its website. Sites with scores below 60 are labeled “unreliable.”

PragerU/NewsGuard Ratings

PragerU and NewsGuard Exchange Emails

The emails from 2021 between PragerU’s Chief of Staff Adrienne Johnson and the NewsGuard Co-CEOs seem to indicate PragerU was reputationally and financially damaged by a NewsGuard red rating of 57.

Notably, officials from PragerU clarified in its emails that it is not a news website, but a “nonprofit focused on producing and marketing well-researched, issue-driven educational content” featuring healthy debate from experts. As such, PragerU discloses its donations with the required IRS 990 form and does not disclose that information on its website as “required by NewsGuard.” NewsGuard disregarded the disclosure because of its standards, not because the information was unavailable.

NewsGuard penalized PragerU for never having “corrected one-sided claims related to COVID or hydroxy,” all of which were objectively and verifiably true. Specifically, NewsGuard challenged PragerU’s sharing of videos featuring America’s Frontline Doctors “that promoted false claims about the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine” as a “proven cure for COVID-19.” Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin have been well-known as effective early treatments for COVID-19 since early in the pandemic but were suppressed by the government and its overly helpful legacy media partners. NewsGuard challenged PragerU’s removal of the videos because PragerU failed to publish a correction once the videos were removed.

Sadly, PragerU had removed the videos not because they were incorrect but “due to overall social media censorship on the topic.” One of the emails shows CEO Marissa Streit writing that PragerU “created an ROI analysis on our end, and we removed it rather than face the penalties of censorship.”

NewsGuards also reprimanded PragerU influencer Will Witt who stated in a video that “children aren’t actually dying from the virus.” Witt allegedly cited without attribution a “study with the statistics of children ages 0-18 who had died from COVID-19, “none of whom died.”  Witt’s statement was not far from the mark because CDC data shows that almost no healthy children have died from COVID-19.

It appears that NewsGuard may have held Witt accountable for inexact wording, not for the spirit of the claim. It is not clear from the emails whether NewsGuard upheld its promise to “ensure” Witt or PragerU had a chance to be more exact in its language or supply “feedback” for the “failed” information on its website.

At one point in the exchange, Streit asks for confirmation from NewsGuard to certify that the “removal of certain content” will “remove any negative marks on our ratings and provide us with “Green” status—a stamp of approval that should be unnecessary in America as a prerequisite to the exchange of ideas.

Streit ultimately revealed that NewsGuard held PragerU to account for “less than 0.001% of its overall content.” Even though Streit made specific good-faith efforts to reply directly to the ratings and even removed truthful content to avoid censorship, NewsGuard doubled down and persisted with its bias. Streit wrote:

PragerU Email/NewsGuard/Streit

Directors, Advisors, and Investors

NewsGuard’s directors, advisors, and investors are an interesting cast of characters. One of the investors, Publicis Groupe, is “the third largest communications group in the world.” Publicic allegedly has “shadowy ties to Saudi Arabia.” Pfizer and Bayer/Monsantoare two of its top clients. Ironically, many of the advisors/directors are former U.S. government officials, entertainment moguls, and journalists “associated with agencies known for producing false news.”

Among the advisors is Michael Hayden, former Director of the NSA and CIA, who was “the architect of George W. Bush’s secret domestic spying program.” Tom Ridge was the first Office of Homeland Security Director following 9/11. Richard Stengel “is a former senior official in Obama’s state department who once described his role as being that of ‘chief propagandist.‘”

Below are two videos with Stengel discussing his thoughts on free speech and NewsGuard’s role in the information landscape. He says he used to be a “free-speech absolutist” but has changed his point of view as he has traveled the world. Stengel states that his travels have taught him that “Our notion of free speech is an outlier to people. The First Amendment is no longer working.” He shares he has become more sympathetic to legislation for hate speech. “There is a design flaw in the First Amendment in the age of social media. We need to start thinking about hate speech laws.”

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