DOD Pays Media-Rating Scammers To Create Propaganda And Censorship Tech For U.S. Government

The Department of Defense is grooming for-profit, media-rating grifters to develop AI censorship technology for the U.S. government, an investigation by The Federalist reveals. Open-source research reveals this troubling development is driving the warp-speed growth of the Censorship-Industrial Complex—and several other concerning details.

Following last week’s congressional hearings on the Censorship-Industrial Complex, attention focused on the media-ratings giant NewsGuard and its relationship with the DOD after the company’s CEO declared it is not “government-funded.” But, as The Federalist reported, in 2020 NewsGuard received a $25,000 award from the federal government to conduct a pilot study, after winning the COVID-19 Disinformation Challenge. The prize package included the opportunity to learn the ropes of profiteering by participating in a “Government Contracting 101 session” and a “Small Business Innovation Research (SBIRC) crash course.”

The following year, NewsGuard scored a nearly $750,000 award from the federal Small Business Innovation Research Center (SBIRC), to allow NewsGuard to further develop its “Misinformation Fingerprints” program in conjunction with the DOD. That program relies on NewsGuard’s questionable “reliability” ratings of news websites and its database of so-called “hoaxes, falsehoods and misinformation narratives.” From there, the project uses “AI and social listening tools to identify the initial source of the hoax,” and to find instances of the hoax being “repeated or amplified” online.