A leftist raises money for censoring the internet
According to Daniel Greenfield, that's what a certain propagandist is doing:
How can you tell that internet censorship is really taking off? Easy. It’s becoming a business model.If memory serves, the Weekly Standard was part of the Never Trump crowd, so I wouldn't put too much confidence in them to rate as 100 percent trustworthy for conservatives. Now that I think of it, they can be just as crummy as Snopes and Fact Check.
Steven Brill is raising $6 million to launch News Guard. This new service will rate news sites on their trustworthiness from green to red. Forget politically unbiased algorithms. The ratings will be conducted by "qualified, accountable human beings" from teams of “40 to 60 journalists.” Once upon a time, journalism meant original writing. Now it means deciding which original writing to censor.
"Can trust be monetized?" The Street’s article on News Guard asks. But it isn’t really trust that’s being monetized. It’s censorship. It’s doing the dirty work that Google and Facebook don’t want to do.
The Dems and their media allies have been pressuring Google and Facebook to do something about the “fake news” that they blame for Trump’s win. The big sites outsourced the censorship to media fact checkers. The message was, “Don’t blame us, now you’re in charge.”
Facebook made a deal with ABC News and the AP, along with Politifact, FactCheck and Snopes, to outsource the censoring for $100K. When two of these left-wing groups declare that an article is fake, Facebook marks it up and viewership drops by 80%.
Facebook is reportedly considering adding the Weekly Standard to its panel of fact checkers. Even if that were to happen, it would be the difference between putting the New York Times without David Brooks or the Times with David Brooks in charge of deciding what you can read on Facebook. Adding a token conservative who is acceptable to the left doesn’t change the inherent bias of the system.
News Guard is an ominous warning that online censorship is becoming a viable business model as the big tech companies look around for someone else to do their dirty work for them. But subcontracted censorship is still censorship. [...]And that's why you should guard against News Guard. They sound like a pretty bad bunch alright.
Labels: communications, Moonbattery, msm foulness, United States
