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“Fact-checking” group NewsGuard is reportedly selling censorship technology funded by some $750,000 in taxpayer dollars to a slew of companies — including Microsoft and its AI-powered bot Bing Chat.
NewsGuard’s “Misinformation Fingerprints” tool, which the group billed on its website as “the internet’s most complete, machine-readable catalog of top false claims circulating online,” can be used to designate a “risk of harm” rating and provide “detailed debunks citing trustworthy sources,” according to the group.
NewsGuard also claimed that Microsoft incorporates the tech into its artificial intelligence-powered chatbot Bing Chat, a rival to ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
“Microsoft trusts the fingerprints as ethically reported, responsible, and unbiased data to train Bing Chat’s large-language models (LLMs) to provide accurate responses to prompts on topics in the news and reduce their propensity to spread false claims,” NewsGuard reported earlier this year.
In the same post, NewsGuard boasted that GIF database GIPHY and the London-based social media platform Ethos Network, which targets Gen Z users, bought Misinformation Fingerprints “and associated ‘debunks’ into its user interface.”
The Post has sought comment from representatives at NewsGuard’s licensees, Microsoft, GIPHY and Ethos Network.
The Federalist earlier reported on Misinformation Fingerprints, citing records from the Department of Defense that revealed the tech was funded with an award from the US government of some $750,000.
It’s unclear how Misinformation Fingerprints determines what qualifies as “disinformation.”
The Federalist — which calls NewsGuard a “for-profit censorship giant” — suggested that the Defense Department had some input in determining what constitutes misinformation as the federal agency worked with NewsGuard to test the technology.
When The Post reached out to NewsGuard for comment, it provided a written statement saying, “Our ratings are based on apolitical journalistic criteria, and we publish them transparently and publicly.
“For example, this is why the New York Post and FoxNews.com get a higher rating than MSNBC.com,” NewsGuard said. “We also contact publishers being rated to provide a chance for them to comment or rectify any issues we’ve raised. And our ratings are designed to equip users with added context about source reliability–without blocking any access to content.”
NewsGuard’s general manager Matt Skibinski shied away from talking dollar figures, adding that “our Misinformation Fingerprints product has been sold to private companies since we first created the product in early 2020.”
“Like most businesses, we don’t comment on the specifics of our agreements with our licensees,” Skibinski added when questioned about what companies bought Misinformation Fingerprints’ tech.
X owner Elon Musk has bashed NewsGuard for calling out X as a cesspool for “egregiously-misleading claims about the Israel-Hamas war.”
NewsGuard earlier this month claimed it identified 30 posts shared by 10 accounts on X that reached a cumulative 92 million users and contained “the most significant false and misleading claims spreading online.”
Musk since fired back, claiming that NewsGuard’s for-profit model amounts to shaking down its targets, saying, “they will only share the data that underpins their purported research if you pay.”
“@NewsGuardRating also uses these reports to pressure companies to buy their ‘fact-checking’ services. It’s a profit over any principle model. X has not seen any of the data in their report. Before publishing, we encourage all media outlets to request the data underpinning their claims,” Musk added in the Nov. 22 post.
In response, NewsGuard’s Skibinski cited a public report from the group which he said included all of the underlying data as it identifed “10 misinformation superspreaders on X publishing claims such as that the murderous attacks by Hamas on Israelis was a ‘false flag.’”
A month prior, Musk called for NewsGuard to be “disbanded immediately” following a separate report revealing the group worked with the European Union on a code prompting governments to take action on alternative news sites.
“What a scam!” Musk added of NewsGuard, which was co-founded by journalist Steve Brill and Gordon Crovitz, a former Business Insider board member and a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal.
NewsGuard addressed the $750,000 handout in its 2021 Social Impact Report, when it said it “was awarded a grant through the Small Business Innovation and Research program, which funds early-stage companies to develop products and technologies that can be helpful for government.”
NewsGuard noted its plans to spend the funding on its Misinformation Fingerprints tool, though it didn’t reveal how much it had received at the time.
The for-profit group also said its “fingerprints” have alerted the Pentagon’s analysts at Cyber Command “to the latest Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and other hostile-information operations.”
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