Any search engine that filters content is engaged in censorship. When the tech giants were starting out they used traffic stats as a basis for popular ranking of results. Yahoo and Google provided reasonable and mostly reliable information retrieval. Those days are long gone and the fallout of banishing information or banning entire sites to a black memory hole has only one conclusion. The artificial intelligence revolution leads to the heterodoxy of the culture. Couple such algorithms with the underlying social and political bias of the technocratic snobs, who want to control a false reality, and you end up with a planet that is unable to decipher the truth.

From the NewsGuard mission statement, Restoring Trust & Accountability.

"NewsGuard uses journalism to fight false news, misinformation, and disinformation. Our trained analysts, who are experienced journalists, research online news brands to help readers and viewers know which ones are trying to do legitimate journalism—and which are not."

Such arrogance of hubris and condescension towards the public is appalling. Last year public sentiment has "Two new Gallup polls have found that wide swaths of the American population believe that the media is biased, inaccurate and full of misinformation – just as President Donald Trump says. One poll found that 62% of U.S. adults believe that the news they see in newspapers, on television or hear on the radio is biased and that 44% say it’s inaccurate."

Aghast that the corporatists toadies still have the gonads to claim that they are journalists. Just what universe do they report on? Pray tell they just do not get it. The mainstream media is the purveyor of the disinformation of record when they omit, deceive, fabricate or outright lie. Fake News is the word product in the newsroom. The news story selection and perspective is pure dribble in this age of political correctness.

For the uninformed and intellectually challenged; reading, viewing or believing the accounts that are manufactured to dumb down the public is an exercise in self-torture. Thus far, Microsoft has their controversial fake news filter NewsGuard built into mobile browser. No doubt some equivalent won't be long in coming to superimpose their gate keeping censorship.

"Among the green-rated websites: Voice of America, CNN, Buzzfeed, the Guardian, New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as left-leaning upstarts such as Vice News and Refinery 29. Ones that are given the red warning label of “failing to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability”: RT and Sputnik (obviously enough) and the right-wing Daily Mail, Breitbart and the Drudge Report, in addition to hundreds of other non-mainstream news websites such as Wikileaks."

Combine this access restriction with the purging of search results and the end result is that alternative media banning becomes complete. Sorry, the internet tech giants are not in the journalism reporting business. A case comparison in unfairness is the manner that the fake news cabal covered the Brett Kavanaugh allegations versus the "presumed innocence" of Ralph 'Coonman' Northam. Any guess what news sources would be deemed misinformation using NewsGuard?

From one of those red-rated sites Breitbart, Financial Blacklisting: NewsGuard Advises Advertisers to Avoid Pro-Trump Media.

"The effect isn’t merely to silence pro-Trump media. It also ensures advertisers don’t market their products to Trump voters, causing them to rely less and less on consumers in the heartland, and more on progressive consumers who read establishment news sources. The ultimate result: corporations cater their products and “corporate values” even more to the latter, and not at all to the former."

Now the veracity of these developments are so obvious to accept, it defies common sense for any critical thinking person to believe the reporting found on the NewsGuard list or the Google, Bing, Yahoo and Facebook search results. In spite of these facts, the uninformed sheeple, the demented NeoCons or the diehard Progressives are so programmed to accept the prevarications as accurate journalism that society has lost its social redeeming purpose.

The internet is dying with each passing day. Individual and independent sites are being systematically eliminated from promoting and communicating. The bulk of ad revenue comes from being on Google, YouTube and Facebook. Soon the removal of right wing voices for authentic populism will deprive the web of meaningful reporting. The ultimate eradication of free speech is the goal of this most recent attack upon American values.

Philip Giraldi sums up, NewsGuard: A Neoconservative Contrivance Which Promotes an Establishment View.

"Make no mistake, NewsGuard is a neoconservative contrivance which promotes an establishment view of what is true and what is false. Its co-founder Gordon Crovitz is an ex-editor of The Wall Street Journal, who has enthused over the project, saying that it is “a milestone in the fight to bring consumers the information they need to counter false information, misinformation and disinformation online.” Crovitz has also been associated with the leading neocon foundation The American Enterprise Institute while the NewsGuard advisory board includes Tom Ridge, who was head of the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush, and Michael Hayden, who directed both the CIA and NSA. It is as government-establishment in orientation as it is possible to be.

So who gets the endorsement from NewsGuard? Those who toe the line on U.S. policy and the establishment globalist/interventionist agenda. It would be interesting to know what NewsGuard’s staff of analysts is really looking for when it researches a site or media outlet. As the examples cited above demonstrate, NewsGuard has nothing to do with taking pains to report the news accurately, nor is there any evidence of real accountability. It is all about who pays the bills and who is in charge. They give the orders and one either falls in line or goes out the door. That is the reality of today’s mainstream media."

An ongoing defense against internet censorship is the most important combat that can be devoted when on the web. When NewsGuard is added as the default in Windows 10, better switch to Linux.

SARTRE - February 5, 2019

http://www.batr.org/stupid/020519.html