A Washington Free Beacon report said NewsGuard has promoted AI-related misinformation tools while giving some Chinese state-owned outlets higher reliability scores than several American center-right news sites.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
NewsGuard is facing renewed criticism after a report said the media-rating organization has promoted tools for artificial intelligence companies while assigning higher reliability scores to some Chinese state-owned outlets than to several American conservative news organizations.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that NewsGuard, which rates the credibility of news outlets and sells data used by advertisers and other clients, announced an AI-focused tool in 2023 aimed at combating misinformation. Critics have accused the company of operating a blacklist against conservative media and enabling censorship by discouraging advertisers from supporting disfavored outlets.
NewsGuard says it evaluates news sources based on factors tied to the likelihood that they spread misinformation or disinformation. The organization then licenses its data to clients, including advertisers, who may use those ratings when deciding where to place ads.
The Free Beacon report said NewsGuard encouraged AI companies to use its ratings during “supervised learning,” a process that can shape how AI systems evaluate information and align outputs with developer preferences. NewsGuard said its data could be licensed in a machine-readable format suited for AI systems designed to limit the spread of misinformation.
“Without tools like NewsGuard for AI, which can be used during supervised learning to train transformer models, AI language models risk becoming … the ‘next great misinformation superspreader,’” NewsGuard said in a press release.
NewsGuard Chief Operating Officer Matt Skibinski disputed claims about how the company markets its data, saying NewsGuard does not promote its ratings “for AI model training.”
The report raised concerns that AI systems using NewsGuard’s ratings could treat some American conservative outlets as less reliable than Chinese state-owned media. The Free Beacon cited NewsGuard’s rating for China Daily, a state-owned outlet, which received a score of 44.5 out of 100. Newsmax received a score of 20.
NewsGuard said China Daily “does not publish false or egregiously misleading content at a significant level.” By contrast, the organization said Newsmax “has advanced false or egregiously misleading claims on health, U.S. politics, and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, such that a visitor to the site risks being seriously misled.”
Other center-right outlets also received low scores from NewsGuard. The Federalist received a 17.5, while One America News Network received a 22.2. NewsGuard said readers of those outlets risk “being significantly misled on important topics.”
China Global Television Network, which NewsGuard described as a “mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party,” received a 44.5. The score was five points below the Daily Wire, which received a 49.5.
The ratings prompted criticism from Mike Benz, a former State Department official and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, who argued that NewsGuard’s AI work could influence which sources AI systems trust or downgrade.
“The obvious danger of NewsGuard’s entry into AI is that it induces the same censorious changes to AI that it did to media and social media,” Benz told the Free Beacon. “The fear every citizen should rightly have is that a highly biased private firm could influence or effectively control the sources from which AI derives its decisions, the same way NewsGuard’s blacklists were used to control the media sources to which audiences could have access.”
The debate also drew attention online after Aaron Sibarium posted about the Free Beacon report.
NewsGuard has said it offers election-related protections for AI products. In a 2024 press release, the company described a “suite of protections to safeguard AI productions from election misinformation,” saying that “in a year with more than 40 major elections worldwide,” the tools would help prevent AI products from “being exploited or causing inadvertent harm.”
The Free Beacon reported that it is unclear which AI companies have purchased NewsGuard data because the company does not disclose its clients. Anthropic and Microsoft told the outlet they do not use NewsGuard data to train their respective models. OpenAI and Google DeepMind did not respond to requests for comment, according to the report.
Gene Hamilton, president of America First Legal, said the issue raises questions about who gets to define reliability in AI systems.
“It’s the same fundamental issue as before, but AI makes it even easier to silence dissenting views,” Hamilton said. “Who decides what’s reliable and what’s not?”
Skibinski said “AI companies do not license our data about domestic news sites.”
“The only AI-industry use of our data has been through our FailSafe for AI product,” Skibinski said, referring to NewsGuard data focused on Russian, Chinese and Iranian sources.
“AI companies would be welcome to license our full dataset if they wished to do so,” he added.
Skibinski also disputed the claim that NewsGuard gives lower ratings to center-right American outlets than Chinese state-run media.
“Your statement that NewsGuard gives ‘lower ratings to rightwing American outlets than to Chinese state-run media’ is not accurate, no, despite the cherry-picked set of sites you describe here,” Skibinski wrote in an email to the Free Beacon. “If what you’re instead asking is whether a particular website, Newsmax, had so much false or egregiously misleading content on its site that it somehow managed to score even lower than a Chinese state media outlet, that is true—but the fact that so many other conservative-leaning sites are rated credible is evidence enough that Newsmax’s score is not based on its political leaning.”
Hamilton argued that NewsGuard should not rate Chinese state-owned outlets at all because of the limits on independent journalism inside China.
“There’s no measuring stick for a NewsGuard to measure the veracity of a state-controlled news outlet in China,” Hamilton told the outlet. “You’re never going to get actual, unbiased information.”
The report has intensified debate over whether private media-rating firms should influence advertising markets, search systems or AI products, particularly when their scores may affect how news sources are ranked, trusted or suppressed by automated tools.
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