Newsguard co-CEO Steven Brill in Brussels on Tuesday claimed that news sites that have recently criticized Newsguard’s motives — MintPress among them — are “secretly supported” by the Russian government, a claim for which he provided no evidence....MintPress News
Newsguard Turns to EU to Push Controversial Ratings System on Tech Companies, Smears MintPress as “Secretly Supported” by Russia
Whitney Webb
Not only narrative control.
But "be afraid of Huawei."
Bloomberg
Major DNA Testing Company [Family Tree] Sharing Genetic Data With the FBI
Kristen V Brown
4 comments:
What a bullshit product. This is scary stuff, censorship is coming full swing. But it mostly won't be as heavy handed like old-school outright censorship. It'll be more like the brilliance of the overall US propaganda system, which is far more effective and sophisticated than any dictatorial state run media. Like Chomsky said, any dictator would be utterly thrilled to have the US media.
The real, valuable, news content will be pushed down off the first search page, to the bottom of the 57th google page, and/or their bandwidth will slow to a crawl. The ranking systems will give any news that doesn't conform to the govt line, a low ranking and push it to the bottom of the list, so average people won't ever come across it by chance. Those who really care what's going on will still be able to jump through hoops to find it, allowing our leaders to say "See, look, no censorship".
A similar game is played with corrections today. A large front page headline that's false gets everyone's attention. A week later when it's proven false the correction comes in a one square inch block on the bottom of page D17 that no one sees, leaving the lie to continue to color everyone's perceptions. It's the whole a-lie-goes-around-the-world-while-the-truth-is-lacing-its-boots sort of thing.
In other instances, there might be more heavy handed censorship, but it won't come from the govt. Companies like Facebook and Twitter, being a private company, will provide cover for it, when it starts deleting posts or refusing to let you share non-preapproved sources. ISP and hosting companies are likely to also get thrown in the mix, taking down sites for whatever bullshit reason. But they're a private company, they get to do what they want, and it won't get labeled as censorship. And our leaders still get to say, "See, look, no censorship.", which will only be true in the narrowest, strictest dictionary definition.
Then when wikileaks leaks the documents and emails showing cooperation between the govt and these private companies, the link to it will be down on the 57th page, labeled as a Russian psy-op. And what were you doing reading it anyways, are you anti-American?
“This is scary stuff, censorship is coming full swing.” ~ Joe
Don’t worry about it. Newsguard is a money-making scam dreamed up by two individuals. It is censorship-for-hire. The idea is to study various digital markets, and see who the leader is and who its competitors are. Newguards goes to the leader and says that for a monthly fee, NewsGuard will designate the leader’s competitors as “fake news.”
I say don’t worry about it because no one in the public will fall for NewsGuard’s arbitrary designations. On the contrary, when NewsGuard brands a web site as “fake news,” it will alert people that this is a website worth visiting.
Media outlets will quickly see this, and will choose to not continue paying NewsGuard.
Sounds like they have a deal with Microsoft. But Microsoft isn't the player it used to be. At least they're getting some push back from other companies.
Yes NewsGuard has a deal with Microsoft for smart phones, but it doesn’t matter, since Microsoft will end its support for Widows-for-phones on 10 Dec 2019. The Microsoft experiment failed.
Microsoft is telling its customers to switch to Android or iPhone.
As for PCs, you won’t be plagued by NewsGuard unless you go to the NewsGuard web site and download the ap – which no one will do.
NewsGuard was a cute idea, but it won’t go anywhere. It was an attempt to capitalize on censorship mania. "For a monthly fee, we'll steer web traffic away from your competiors."
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