FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr is taking on four major Big Tech companies for their involvement in an alleged “censorship cartel” that he says targeted Americans for promoting narratives that the companies did not agree with.
Carr sent letters to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Apple CEO Tim Cook requesting that they provide the FCC with information pertaining to NewsGuard — a left-wing organization that has played a role in targeting conservatives online.
“Over the past few years, Americans have lived through an unprecedented surge in censorship,” Carr said in his letter. “Your companies played significant roles in this improper conduct. Big Tech companies silenced Americans for doing nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights.”
Carr said that the companies worked with so-called “media monitors” to censor speech involving politics, science, and religion.
The companies worked to “defund, demonetize, and otherwise put out of business news outlets and organizations that dared to deviate from an approved narrative,” Carr said.
Carr said that various congressional investigations and news reports showed the companies operated this “censorship cartel” with the help of Biden-Harris administration.
The letter said:
The relevant conduct extended from removing or blocking social media posts to labeling whole websites or apps as ‘untrustworthy’ or ‘high-risk’ in an apparent effort to suppress their information and viewpoints, including through efforts to delist them, lower their rankings, or harm their profitability. This censorship cartel is an affront to Americans’ constitutional freedoms and must be completely dismantled. Americans must be able to reclaim their right to free speech. Indeed, our democracy depends on freedom of expression.
Carr said that the incoming Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress would be taking a close look at the companies’ actions.
He requested information about their work with NewsGuard, a for-profit company that bills itself as the Internet’s arbiter of truth by “rat[ing] the credibility of news and information outlets and tell[ing] readers and advertisers which outlets they can trust.”
He noted that congressional investigations have found that NewsGuard selects “winner and losers in the news media space” by using its partnerships with advertising agencies to censor targeted outlets.
The letter said that NewsGuard’s own track record was a serious problem, for example rating “official propaganda from the Communist Party of China as more credible than American publications.”
NewsGuard also has on its advisory board at least one person who “signed the now infamous October 2020 letter from former intelligence community officials that flamed the false claim that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation — a letter that itself fueled a wave of censorship.”
Carr said that the companies had until December 10 to provide information to the FCC about all of their products and services that use or enable their customers to use NewsGuard.
Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft & others have played central roles in the censorship cartel.
The Orwellian named NewsGuard along with “fact checking” groups & ad agencies helped enforce one-sided narratives.
The censorship cartel must be dismantled. pic.twitter.com/Xf0sEYOUfv
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) November 15, 2024
