Ron DeSantis has been fighting back against Big Tech’s war on conservatives.
Their sinister tactics are growing more sophisticated.
Now, a Florida official is going to war against this Chinese-style censorship scheme.
Florida cuts ties with companies promoting censorship
Online censorship is being outsourced to third-party companies who get to play bad cop for Big Tech and other actors.
NewsGuard is a company run by left-wing hacks who give “trust ratings” to websites based on criteria they make up.
A group of biased journalists are used by the company to come up with the ratings.
The goal of the rating system is to discredit and drive advertisers away from conservative or other websites that challenge the Left’s preferred political narrative.
They also serve to defend misinformation from the Left.
NewsGuard handed out a 100/100 credibility rating to the New York Times and National Public Radio (NPR) during the 2020 Election for stories that called Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop Russian misinformation.
The state of Florida is cutting ties with NewsGuard and other groups like it that engage in censorship.
Florida Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Jimmy Patronis issued a directive to the Florida Department of Financial Services (DFS), the agency that he manages, to prohibit doing business with companies like NewsGuard that censor and blacklist with the use of so-called “credibility ratings.”
“Florida rejects censorship! Today, I barred [the Florida Department of Financial Services] from working with censorship & blacklisting groups like NewsGuard. These groups issue ‘credibility ratings’ on news sources to diminish information they don’t like. That’s wrong!” Patronis wrote on X.
Taxpayers should not fund an attack on free speech
The DFS is barred under Patronis’ directive from using “censorship media-monitoring services when making ad-buys or marketing placements.”
Patronis explained that this is a win for Florida taxpayers.
“This year we’ll be launching media campaigns on protecting the public from insurance fraud and educating Floridians on the services DFS provides, and we need maximum returns on those dollars,” Patronis explained. “We don’t need so-called media-monitoring groups being middlemen and burning up cash needlessly when we’re trying to get the best returns on our investments.”
NewsGuard’s activities landed it on the radar of House Republicans for contracts with Biden’s Department of Defense and State Department.
A federal lawsuit accused the company of trying to censor reporting that was critical of the Biden administration.
“NewsGuard was investigated by the U.S. House Oversight Committee for its relationships with federal agencies, and its apparent failure to maintain a professed nonpartisan approach in light of ‘highly partisan social media activities by NewsGuard employees,’” a statement from Patronis said.
Patronis accused information rating companies of being part of a bigger scheme like the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing movement.
“Such news and information ratings activities appear to be part of a larger effort to create social credit scores, similar to ESG, that result in debanking and deplatforming legitimate private entities. That’s wrong, and I will use my authority as CFO to protect businesses and consumers against these abusive tactics,” Patronis explained.
Florida is standing up for taxpayers and the First Amendment by not supporting this Orwellian scheme.
DeSantis Daily will keep you up-to-date on any new developments in this ongoing story.
