There’s a group of people who control what you are allowed to see–the news you read, the videos you watch, the posts you engage with.
This is the opening sentence of Ben Shapiro, “Meet the Company Trying to Control Your Mind,” The Daily Signal, August 2, 2023. The whole thing is worth reading.
This is a rare instance where the title is more accurate than the opening line. Shapiro makes a good case that a company called NewsGuard has inordinate influence on what ideas get spread and looked at. Indeed, one of my friends who’s managing editor of a site spent over 10 hours answering NewsGuard’s questions. NewsGuard even told him that his site should list the names of everyone who contributes $100 or more. He pointed out that NewsGuard received a high six-digit payment from the Pentagon but didn’t list the Pentagon as a finder. Fortunately, my friend has refused to trim his site’s sails.
Shapiro writes:
NewsGuard is also working with others to use AI technology to enforce Brand Safety standards at scale, by identifying scalable hoaxes and misinformation in order to streamline blanket removal. This means that the news that you read, news that is supposed to be fair and objective or at least diverse, must adhere to GARM [Global Alliance for Responsible Media], the WEF [World Economic Forum], the WFA [World Federation of Advertisers], and their subjective and biased standards in order to be deemed monetizable.
I think Shapiro is correct here.
At the same time, he overstates. It’s not a matter of what you’re allowed to see; it’s a matter of what’s easy and convenient for you to see.
I object to the “allow” language for two reasons. First, it’s inaccurate; you can, sometimes with a lot of effort and sometimes with little effort, find things that these groups don’t want you to see. Second, it’s demotivating; if Shapiro or others convince you that you can’t see certain things, you can see yourself at the effect of the world rather than a powerful person determined to make his or her own way in the world.
Shapiro’s first sentence reminds me of something I wrote about some students who staged a walkout from Greg Mankiw’s economics class at Harvard. In “What Greg Mankiw’s Defenders Missed,” EconLog, November 9, 2011, I quoted this statement from one of the protestors: “As your class does not include primary sources and rarely features articles from academic journals, we have very little access to alternative approaches to economics.”
I wrote:
The only way they have “very little access to alternative approaches to economics” is if they don’t have the web and they don’t have libraries. Is Harvard lacking in those? I think not.
That’s why I satirically led my post with:
News Flash: Harvard Has no Access to the Web and No Libraries
If you think you have zero power to choose, you will act as if you have zero power to choose. Don’t be that person.
UPDATE: Here is a link to the $749,387 payment from the Department of Defense to NewsGuard.
READER COMMENTS
Jon Murphy
Aug 3 2023 at 8:29am
I have a family member who acts like that. It’s not worth it to change their behavior because the entire system is rigged against him (not just rigged. Rigged against him). Consequently, they’ve become very angry and detached.
Brandon Berg
Aug 3 2023 at 8:44am
Given that the “alternative approaches to economics” that the students protesting Mankiw were demanding were likely nonsense like Marxism and MMT, maybe it’s best that they did act as if they had zero power to choose.
steve
Aug 3 2023 at 11:41am
Strikes me as at least partially a liability/marketing issue. Rather than pay your own people to figure out what is true or not true, what will get you in trouble or not with your advertising, you outsource it. If they screw up you blame NewsGuard, issue some mea culpas and move on to the next version of NewsGuard. We just recently decided talked about removing rainbows from our pediatric floor and from advertising. Too many complaints that the rainbows were there to support gay pride. Heck, using rainbows with kids was around well before we invented gay people but you dare not offend anyone.
Steve
Monte
Aug 3 2023 at 1:41pm
True, for the moment. However, I think Shapiro is more concerned here with the news-filtering that will take place going forward based on NewsGuard’s misinformation fingerprinting, and in that regard, he is not overstating, IMO. NewsGuard has presumably identified a “lack of governance” that “leaves open the possibility of hoaxes being spread among a population that is vulnerable to being confused or misled because they lack information about the trustworthiness of sources of information.”
It seems consumers must now be provided with “nutrition labels” attached to news sites indicating whether, or to what extent, the content can be trusted. This, we know, just opens the door wider for government working with social media companies like Wikipedia to justify banning websites whose reporting, they believe, could have “dangerous consequences.”
The average consumer doesn’t need to read the nutrition label on a candy bar to know that it’s unhealthy. Neither does the average consumer need to read a nutrition label on the British tabloid newspaper, The Sun, to know that Freddie Starr didn’t actually eat Lea LaSalle’s pet hamster after placing it between two slices of bread. Let consumers decide for themselves what they choose to eat or read.
But thank you, NewsGuard, for formally bringing to our attention the obvious.
David Seltzer
Aug 3 2023 at 6:09pm
ALLOW? NO! If one is skeptical and doggedly curious they will determine for themselves the verity of an issue. During the Cold War between the US and Russia, the state news outlet was Pravda. It was countervailed by Radio Free Europe. A caveat; RFE is a US government funded media organization that broadcasts and reports news. I read; The National Review, The Dispatch, Hoover Daily Report, Bari Weiss, Glen Loury and RealClearPolitics. I don’t know how many others do because the marginal cost of search exceeds an individuals marginal benefit. Is there something akin to voter’s paradox in search of the truth that NewsGuard exploits?
Mark Z
Aug 3 2023 at 10:07pm
While it doesn’t affect what you’re allowed to see, it does effectively tax seeing certain things. What NewsGuard does is not strictly in accord with voluntarism, and not just because it’s taxpayer money that subsidizes them. If a government systematically subsidized publications that, just to pick an example, supported raising the minimum wage, this would amount to a tax on public opposition to the raising minimum wage, by artificially imposing a disadvantage on publications that oppose it relative to those that support it. If the subsidy is high enough, it eventually has almost the same effect as a ban, as hardly any publications will take the more expensive position. So when the government subsidizes a biased third party moderator or filter, giving them an advantage in the market over competitors without this bias (or with a different bias), they are effectively taxing publication of opinions contrary to what the moderator (and the politicians supporting them) supports.
Of course, the actual subsidy to NewsGuard is minuscule and I doubt has much discernible effect on anything. But while it’s not that concerning in practice, it’s concerning at a conceptual level, since it shows that the government can potentially circumvent the first amendment by using subsidies, which, if deployed toward the right kinds of organizations, could have the same effect as taxing certain political opinions, but in a way much less likely to get challenged in court.
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