Meet Your Censor: NewsGuard

It decides for you

Rosemary (Tantra) Bensko
7 min readJul 5, 2020

Ultimately, advertising money censors ideas

Newsguard is a fact checker browser plug-in that’s becoming quickly integrated into all the ways you search online, and it will soon be in place everywhere internationally by default. It displays a color labeling system to indicate an article or website’s trustworthiness — according to what the people funding it want you to believe.

If that, or another fact checker, dismisses a credible site, it will tank, will be demonitized and be unable to purchase advertising anywhere that would normally have made it available to you to discover, such as Google Adsense. Bing won’t deliver it to you.

So, how can you find information that isn’t being pushed to the top of Google due to a profit-making agenda? You’re smart and conscientious, interested in delving below the layer of social engineering to research accurately. You know Google and Bing are biased censors involved in surveillance.

So, you try to avoid the major search engines Google and Bing by using alternative sites to find information instead.

Good for you!

Are these actually search engines, though?

AOL, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Siri, Disconnect Search, MetaGer, Lukol, Hulbee, Gibiru, Startpage?

No, sorry, they aren’t.

They just theoretically keep Google or Bing from knowing who you are, but they source the search results from those search engines. They don’t find the results independently.

So, whatever method you use to search for information online, you can’t escape the mighty NEWSGUARD. Doot. doot. doom.

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

What is NewsGuard?

NewsGuard is a business that is motivated by advertising money to promote what mega-spenders like Big Pharma, the tobacco and junk food industries, and MSM wants you to hear. And it gets rid of competing articles and videos that might make you question those behemoths.

And it’s not just your private search on your laptop that’s controlled by them. NewsGuard also determines what your children can find in schools or libraries. Who is in charge of the ideas, histories and visionary models that mold your children’s behaviors that will affect their future?

If you install NewsGuard on your device, it provides an icon that rates the results you find with searching, and also rates the articles and videos you scroll through that your friends posted on Facebook, Twitter and so on. It’s already part of Microsoft Edge, the browser for iOS and Android.

Photo by Kirill Balobanov on Unsplash

Now, the company is lobbying to be installed by default on — everything. Internationally. Your sense of truth will soon come entirely from whatever “truth” pays NewsGuard the most money to advertise its agenda to you.

NewsGuard has other sponsorship besides its advertisers that I mentioned. It was originally able to go into business due to funding by the advertising company, Publicis Groupe, which makes big industries bigger. The Groupe focuses on their clients, the vaccine companies, Google and Facebook Messenger, biotech genetic engineering, Bayer, Roche, Lilly, etc. And they have restricted your access to methods of strengthening your health without medicine.

Publicis is accompanied by the Paley Center, which is basically — mainstream media. NewsGuard lives at the Paley Center and their core members are part of both companies.

But fake news is a real problem, right?

Sure.

Fakery can come from mainstream or from indie journalists. But Newsguard isn’t interested in fake or real; it’s interested in money.

No matter how many times CNN’s major lies are officially proven to be incorrect, (as one example) NewsGuard keeps giving them top ratings along with the other media outlets that get busted. While credible sites that demonstrate factual science are given low ratings if they contest those very lies.

The company’s leadership is full of big-time players, including the original Secretary of Homeland Security (now on the board of a weapons manufacturer) and the ex-chief of the NSA and CIA, the CFR, the White House communications director and so on. Its advisory board lists intelligence operatives and many people who manipulate public opinion. An example of investors — one was an execu at Booz Allen Hamilton, was CEO of Reuters, board member of Merk, CFR, Atlantic Council and Morgan Stanley. One advisor labeled himself “chief propagandist.

Photo by Tu Tram Pham on Unsplash

They’re connected with the Atlantic Council, which is funded by such obviously non-biased luminaries as CFR, Rand, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and the military, among others just as invested in making and deploying weapons.

Says journalist Whitney Webb at MintPress: “A co- founder of Newsguard, Wall Street insider and CFR member, [Louis Gordon] Crovitz, “has repeatedly been accused of inserting misinformation into his Wall Street Journal columns, with groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation accusing him of “repeatedly getting his facts wrong” on NSA surveillance and other issues. Some of the blatant falsehoods that have appeared in Crovitz’s work have never been corrected, even when his own sources called him out for misinformation.”’

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

What can we do?

Well, buy print books, print out articles if they may be pulled, download videos that may be removed, download controversial videos and post them on non-censoring sites like MeWe. Financially support your favorite journalists, websites and magazines and share their articles on social media. If they’re labeled “fake” include in your share the reasons why that might be.

Show your children material that backs up your points before it’s gone and let them know that what they access at school or the library is not the full story. Don’t install NewsGuard. Once it’s ubiquitous by default and makes unbiased information disappear, keep your memory strong as you can, so you can quote the facts without having to rely on searching for the sources online.

Practice critical thinking skills so that, when materials that counter the mainstream narrative are no longer available, you know how to question the social engineering methods.

If you’re not familiar with MSM lying propensities, read the pieces I linked in this article about a tiny number of the times MSM was caught with fake news. And take what newscasters or major magazines tell you with a grain of salt.

Vet the sources, and look at who is funding them and what their agenda might be. Are the universities they authors are associated with known for promoting hawkish propaganda? Do the speakers make appearances on sketchy sites that are sensationalized and creating fear in order to sell survivalist products or gather names to sell to Stratfor?

Are the authors disinformation agents providing 80 percent good stuff and 20 percent falsehood in order to cover up something and make the true believers look stupid? That makes people associate anyone interested in the 80 percent good stuff with people who go around spouting the 20 percent falsehood. Could they be Intelligence assets putting a spin on who the bad guys are through covering up malfeasance by their country of choice?

Always consider what might really be going on that you can no longer find through searching online.

What else? Any ideas?

Go!

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Rosemary (Tantra) Bensko

Gold-medal-winning psychological suspense novelist, writing Instructor, manuscript editor living in Berkeley.