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By Charlie McCarthy    |   Thursday, 14 November 2024 06:47 PM EST

The senior Republican commissioner on the FCC is demanding that Big Tech companies fess up about their censorship activities targeting conservatives during the Biden years.

In a letter sent Wednesday and obtained by Newsmax, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote to the CEOs at the four largest tech companies — Apple’s Tim Cook, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai — demanding information about the censorship activities.

Carr began his letter, “Over the past few years, Americans have lived through an unprecedented surge in censorship” adding, “Your companies played significant roles in this improper conduct.”

He noted that their companies and others “silenced Americans” for simply exercising their First Amendment rights.

Carr also lambasted the tech companies for working with so-called “media monitors” and other “fact-checkers.”

In a statement to Newsmax, Carr said he issued the letter because “the American people are tired of Big Tech censorship and media bias.”

In his letter, Carr asserted that these media monitors masquerade as truth arbiters, but their real purpose has been “to defund, demonetize, and otherwise put out of business news outlets” that differed from establishment media thinking.

Carr specifically identified in his letter left-wing media monitor NewsGuard, which exists to “censor free speech and conservative news outlets.”

Carr’s letter reported on evidence from Elon Musk’s release of “the Twitter Files” showing that NewsGuard worked “as part of the broader censorship cartel.”

Elon Musk has argued that NewsGuard should be “disbanded immediately” following a 2023 report that it worked with the European Union on a code prompting governments to take action on alternative news sites.

Musk has called NewsGuard “a propaganda shop that will produce any lies you want if you pay them enough money.”

NewsGuard claims to rate media outlets for risk and accuracy.

However, several studies by the Media Research Center and a House Committee on Small Business 2024 staff report found the group consistently rated conservative media lower than left-wing outlets.

Carr said NewsGuard ranks official propaganda outlets for China’s Communist Party as more credible than respected conservative media outlets.

NewsGuard, he explained, has often been wrong, and pointed out the fact they “aggressively fact checked and penalized websites that reported on the COVID-19 lab leak theory.”

The U.S. government later admitted the virus likely began in Wuhan, China, though NewsGuard strongly disputed the claim early on.

NewsGuard was founded in 2018 by longtime Democrat operative and donor Stephen Brill, who had supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, among many others Democrat candidates.

Brill has been an outspoken party supporter dating to the days of the Clinton administration and later became an advocate for Obama administration policies, including Obamacare.

In 2020, he publicly supported claims that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian misinformation, though the Department of Justice later acknowledged it was not.

NewsGuard partners with advertising agencies that use their rating systems to deny conservative media advertising revenues.

Major agencies that partner with NewsGuard include Publicis, IPG, OMG, Magnite, OpenX and Comscore.

NewsGuard also provides software that restricts conservative media outlets on web browsers, including those found on Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari, and Microsoft’s Bing.

Carr also said that NewsGuard recently has branched out to monitor artificial intelligence systems.

Carr, who was appointed by Donald Trump to the FCC in 2017, indicated that the incoming Trump administration will make censorship a major focus to protect First Amendment rights.

“I am confident that once the ongoing transition is complete, the Administration and Congress will take broad ranging actions to restore the First Amendment rights that the Constitution grants to all Americans — and those actions can include both a review of your companies’ activities as well as efforts by third-party organizations and groups that have acted to curtail those rights,” he wrote.

Carr is giving Big Tech companies until Dec. 10 to provide the FCC with information relating to their use of misinformation monitors like NewsGuard. He is also asking for the names of advertising agencies that partner with their companies.

Carr’s letter comes as congressional interest and actions targeting pro-censorship groups like NewsGuard have grown.

In 2023, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers, R-Ala., moved to have the defense authorization bill include restrictions on Pentagon recruitment programs using advertising agencies that utilize misinformation monitors.

In June, Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability launched an investigation into the impact of NewsGuard on protected First Amendment speech and its potential to serve as a nontransparent agent of censorship campaigns.

Last month, Oversight Chair James Comer, R-Ky., sent a follow-up letter to Brill and Gordon Crovitz, who shares CEO and Editor-in-Chief titles with Brill, seeking additional documents and communications related to all past and present contracts or grants administered by federal government agencies or any other government entity, including foreign governments.

NewsGuard spokesman Matt Skibinski responded to Carr’s letter and denied the group was involved in “any censorship or blocking of speech”  or blocking information.

Skibinski said the group was apolitical and cited a handful of conservative media outlets rated higher than liberal ones. He added that Carr’s letter was “littered with other falsehoods.”

Charlie McCarthy ✉

Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.

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