The House Judiciary Committee last week issued a report and held a hearing on “How the World’s Biggest Brands Seek to Control Online Speech.” The Republican-majority committee focused on conservative news outlets denied advertising revenue by being placed on secret blacklists. But the committee understated the multibillion-dollar scale of the matter and, in one case, criticized a company founded to solve the problem.
After a long career as a conservative editorial writer, columnist, and publisher of the Wall Street Journal, I co-founded NewsGuard with Steven Brill in 2018. We saw that news publishers were secretly rated by Silicon Valley platforms such as Facebook and Google and by a left-wing advocacy group called the Global Disinformation Index. Publishers had no idea what criteria the platforms and GDI used to rate them and were not told their rating when they asked.
