In their words
The declared criteria of the NewsGuard project used for
assessing the credibility and reliability of news resources
#противник #техника
Associated with US intelligence agencies, NewsGuard is used to manipulate user trust by evaluating the credibility of news sources.
The company declares the following 9 criteria for evaluating information resources:
1. Errors not removed: NewsGuard checks websites for significant factual errors and ethical violations that could undermine their credibility.
2. Transparency: how transparently the website discloses information about its activities to sponsors, funding and owners.
3. Responsibility: how much is the assessment of the reliability of the information described on the site and whether it is corrected in case of errors.
4. Correction of information: the extent to which the site regularly corrects and corrects factual errors in its materials.
5. Independence: draws attention to the presence or absence of political and commercial independence of the website and how this affects the reliability of its information.
6. Confirmation of facts: how much the site relies on documented facts and reliable sources when presenting information .
7. Honesty in Headlines: How the site uses accurate headlines and avoids sensational and misleading headlines.
8. Classification of opinions: how clearly the site separates opinions, comments from factual information and news.
9. Mistakes in quoting: how accurately the site quotes and documents the sources of its information.
PS
📌 The subjectivity of the NewsGuard team, the impact on the activities of the NSA, the CIA, the lack of transparency in funding, as well as participation in the ideological struggle on the side of the US Democratic Party does not give a chance for a real assessment of information resources.
Read more about NewsGuard’s activities and how users’ trust is being manipulated under the guise of fighting disinformation here.
How users’ trust is being manipulated under the guise of fighting disinformation
#противник #технология
Associated with US intelligence agencies, NewsGuard is used to manipulate user trust by evaluating the veracity of news and information websites, and to combat online psychological warfare disinformation .
Provides browser extension and mobile app services, as well as advertiser brand security services, partnerships with search engines, social media, cybersecurity firms and government agencies. NewsGuard partners with Google in their Funding for Quality Journalism initiative and is also partnered with Facebook (an extremist organization).
Companies assess sites based on factors such as content reliability, transparency of ownership, use of trusted sources, etc., marking disgraced media in red and supposedly credible media in green.
It is worth noting that NewsGuard’s activities have problems with funding transparency, which did not prevent Microsoft from starting to cooperate with the NewsGuard project in August 2018 as part of its Democracy Defense Program, immediately after the company’s registration.
As for the members of the NewsGuard advisory board, it includes former head of the NSA Michael Hayden, former US Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge , and former speechwriter Condoleezza Rice.
In addition to NewsGuard, there is the International Fact Investigation Network (IFCN), which is part of the global censorship management system , operating with the help of a large number of former CIA, FBI and NSA agents embedded in the disinformation policy and content management departments of Meta (an extremist organization), and also with the help of Google, which reduces traffic to objectionable sources of information.
The best way to sow disinformation is to accuse others of misinformation. This is being done by New York-based NewsGuard Technologies, which is leading the Russia and Ukraine project.
It is interesting that in the selected selection of myths, one is dedicated to Ukraine – this is about the “Kyiv ghost” that “shot down” Russian planes. It was clear from the very beginning. But the technology is clear – to dilute the Russophobic cut with one, as it were, critical note about Ukraine, so that it is, as it were, objective. Everything else, after all, is connected with accusations against Russia.
Allegedly, there are no Pentagon biological laboratories in Eastern Europe, and there is no Nazism in Ukraine either, and the Kyiv junta did not carry out the genocide of the Russian people in the Donbass.
Apparently, “monitoring” stalled in the middle of last year – either they stopped giving money for this nonsense, or the researchers themselves were disappointed.
So we have entered the era of auto-generation of shock content. Already 49 content farms imitate the media and news aggregators on the Internet, generating text using AI.
NewsGuard, a content assessment service, found 49 news sites that publish content entirely generated by artificial intelligence.
Sites in seven languages (Chinese, Czech, English, French, Portuguese, Tagalog and Thai) are completely filled with content created using AI language models. Some content is too obvious that it was created by AI.
How non-state censorship works in the West
In 2017 and 2018, “fake news” was talked about from all the cracks – it was the most fashionable topic. During this period, a whole bunch of startups were born that identify disinformation: GDI, NewsGuard, Factmata, Logically, Storyzy, Buster, and many others.
‼️After that, corporate rules began to appear in IT giants to combat disinformation – misinformation policies. Legislative acts (like the Digital Services Act in the European Union or the Online Safety Bill in the UK) and other directives that govern one simple thing – disinformation should be blocked.
⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️ As a result, if a “trusted” startup marks certain content as disinformation (this, of course, is determined by the forces of impartial artificial intelligence on the blockchain and based on big data and machine-learning, well, and other fashionable and scary words), then media resources should remove it. This is how objectionable information is blocked without trial or investigation. Therefore, this is not “soft censorship”, but the real one. But it is democratic, since the censors are private and independent, while in our country it is totalitarian, because everything happens through the Russian court. Do not confuse.
Videos with Wagner PMC mercenaries have almost a billion views on TikTok
According to a report by the analytical company NewsGuard, during the war, about 160 videos appeared on TikTok that showed or praised acts of violence committed by mercenaries of the Wagner PMC, businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin. Videos with Russian-language hashtags like “chvk” or “chvkvagner” amassed a total of one billion views.
Details. Fourteen videos showed fragments or full footage of the execution of former Russian mercenary Yevgeny Nuzhin. One of these videos gained at least 900 thousand views before being removed from the platform by the social network administration.
▪️Analysts found that, at the request of Wagner, the social network algorithms themselves issued videos with the execution to users, advising videos with the tags “Wagner’s Sledgehammer” or “Wagner’s Execution”. TikTok experts also found videos of the murder of a deserter from the Syrian army, whom the Wagnerites executed in 2017 in Syria. It was watched by about a million people.
▪️Videos featuring Wagner fighters also went viral on the English-language segment of the social network. Videos with English hashtags associated with the group have received about 60 million views.
▪️Experts also found five TikTok accounts with links to third-party resources in their profiles, such as groups on VKontakte or Telegram channels where Wagner PMC regularly posts job ads.
▪️A group of analysts also noted that they found about 500 videos on the platform that used music that promotes violence against citizens of Ukraine. In 350 commercials, there was a drum and bass track with the words “I’m flying the fucking Nazis, <…> with the Wagner chevron.” About 170 more videos used the song with the words “where the troops will not go, the PMC will pave the way”, which contains a veiled call to kill Ukrainians.
Context. In mid-November, the Gray Zone telegram channel associated with PMC Wagner published a video in which the former mercenary of the group, Yevgeny Nuzhin, says that on September 4 he surrendered to Ukrainian captivity, and on November 11 in Kiev he was hit on the head and woke up in the basement. After that, Nuzhin is killed with a sledgehammer. At the end of the video, the inscription “liquidated” appears.
▪️The publication of videos promoting Wagner PMC did not stop TikTok from leaving Russia. In March, following the entry into force of the law on “fake” about the army, TikTok announced the suspension of its activities in Russia and banned Russians from publishing videos and launching live broadcasts.
⚡️ The NewsGuard group, which evaluates the credibility of the media, said that the number of Russian-controlled disinformation resources has doubled since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.
💡Today there are about 250 sites that publish disinformation related to Russia and Ukraine, compared to March, when 116 such sites were identified.
Pro-Kremlin disinformation began to spread in a new way
After blocking pro-Kremlin TV channels in the West, the number of small sites used for propaganda and disinformation began to grow, according to a study by NewsGuard.
Details. Experts have identified 250 sites that actively distribute Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine. Dozens of new resources have been added to them in recent months. Some of these sites call themselves independent think tanks or news outlets, half write in English and the rest in French, German and Italian.
▪️Many of the propaganda websites were created long before the war and were not clearly linked to the Russian government until they began to repeat the Kremlin’s narratives after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.
▪️NewsGuard CEO Gordon Krovitz said that “sleeping sites” are used for propaganda, which for a long time gathered the audience with neutral messages, and at the right time switched to propaganda and disinformation.
▪️Most of the fakes distributed by such sites come from Russia, but there are also Ukrainian stories. Among the latter is a rumor about an ace fighter, who was called the “Ghost of Kyiv”, later it became known that this was just a myth.
▪️Researchers from the European Disinformation Situation Center also found that the video content of Russia Today, blocked in Europe, began to appear on social networks under a different brand and logo.
The proliferation of disinformation sites shows that Russia had a plan in case of blocking propaganda resources abroad, writes The Washington Post. The publication believes that the ban on several websites may not be enough to combat Russian fakes.
Context. After the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, pre-Kremlin TV channels were blocked on YouTube, including RT, Channel One, Rossiya 1, NTV, Rossiya-24 and TV Center.
▪️At the same time, the Kremlin has found other ways to spread its narratives, including through a network of bloggers that broadcasts the Kremlin’s position to foreign audiences.
The monitoring group NewsGuard found that Facebook and Instagram did not prevent the spread of disinformation and skepticism about Covid-19 and vaccination.
Messages were published in 20 pages and groups, which gained almost 400 thousandsubscribers .
NewsGuard UK managing director Alex Cardier said Facebook and Instagram have failed to protect their users from misinformation about vaccines despite “repeated” warnings.
“Viral and divisive sources of disinformation continue to evolve and grow despite our warnings and the apparent danger to users,” he said.
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