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August 23, 2023
Online Advertisers Using Government Funded 'NewsGuard' To Demonetize And Censor Conservative Independent News - We Finally Got An Advertiser To Admit It
Early this morning readers may have noted that there was not a new article out at the usual time, and the reason for that was part of our mad dash to find an advertiser that actually brings in enough money to pay at least one of our bills by itself.
It was my fault, as my attempt to apply and "integrate" ANP with the top Google Adsense alternative, in hopes of making enough with that one service, to be able to remove at least two other ad services we are using now, I managed to get us locked out of our very own editing dashboard where we publish articles from.
Ooops? Lesson learned.
We applied to service after service, some accepted us and we are using them, and others, the real money-makers, the ones that would allow us to clean up the pages with less ads but more revenue generation, kept either ignoring our applications or sending a note saying "your site hasn't been approved for Monetization."
No one gave us a reason......until two days ago, when it became apparent that government censorship was at play.
The ads were to be ads within images as to not mess with user experience with even more clutter. We had used this service before until the the ads just stopped showing, so when we decided to hunt advertisers, it seemed a no-brainer to go create new tags to replace the old ones.
They didn't work, so we emailed telling them the codes were there, but the ads weren't showing.
The answer we received was "Hi Susan, This site has been deactivated due to brand safety concerns. Apologies for the inconvenience here. Best, GG Support."
My answer: "What brand safety concerns? Our readers do love our brand because we don't toe the "official narrative" line, and we would like to write an article on what "brand safety" concerns you are manufacturing."
I didn't really expect a response to my snarky email, but the response I did get, shows the level of activity the U.S. government plays in censoring/demonetizing websites.
They use NewsGuard.....well that told us all we needed to know. NewsGuard is a government funded censorship website that targets conservative news for demonetization.
ANP Emergency Fundraiser: The globalists war on ANP is all part of the globalists 'Big Tech' effort to silence conservative and independent voices, allowing them to maintain a monopoly on the flow of information. As George Orwell made clear to us decades ago, "The further a society drifts from the truth, the more they will hate those who speak it." But, with your amazing help, we at ANP promise to keep 'speaking truth to power' because, as Orwell also reminded us, "If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
GOVT FUNDED WEBSITE CONTROLS MONETIZATION OF WEBSITES
While NewsGuard denies they are government funded, they did, in fact, receive $750,000, which would support us for far more than a decade, from the Department of Defense (DoD), which they called a "grant."
Halfway through his thread, titled “The Censorship-Industrial Complex,” Taibbi wrote: “Some NGOs, like the GEC-funded Global Disinformation Index or the DOD-funded NewsGuard, not only see content moderation but apply subjective ‘risk’ or ‘reliability’ scores to media outlets, which can result in a reduction in revenue.” Embedded in the post was a picture of a nearly $750,000 award from the Department of Defense to NewsGuard, an organization the independent journalists characterized as a “government-funded” entity implicated in the Censorship Complex.
In response to Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz’s question — “Who is NewsGuard?” — Shellenberger explained: “Both the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard are U.S. government-funded entities who are working to drive advertisers’ revenue away from disfavored publications and towards the ones they favor.” In Shellenberger’s words, “This is totally inappropriate.”
In September 2021, NewsGuard was awarded a grant through the Small Business Innovation and Research program, which funds early-stage companies to develop products and technologiesthat can be helpful for government......
The U.S. government is literally funding, with grants, a website that is acting as the arbiter of "misinformation" or "disinformation," despite the fact that almost all the "official" news during the Covid lockdowns was in fact disinformation.
They target conservative news, and "green" rate the MSM that has been caught out a numbers of lies, about Covid, the origins, and Hunter Biden's laptop story, just to name a few MSM disinformation topics.
Our stance that lockdowns were bad for the economy, the origin was likely a lab leak in Wuhan, masking was not as effective as claimed, school closures would harm children, and more, were deemed "disinformation" in 2020 and 2021, but have been proven true.
By responsible publisher they mean those that will toe the official narrative line, and never question the MSM preferred storylines.
For those that see our donation requests within the article and the very bottom, this explains 100% why we, and many other Independent Media websites, are hanging on by a thread, and the more advertisers that start using NewsGuard, the less Independent News websites of quality will be left, without reader support, and a lot of it.
Easy fix would be to toe the official narrative line, but that would require deliberately misinforming readers, and stop asking the questions the MSM won't, just to get "green-rated," by a government funded website. We'll shut down ANP before that will ever happen.
Who else is helping NewsGuard demonetize anyone that refuses to mimic the MSM?
Some of the bigger names include: Microsoft, World Health Organization (WHO), Princeton University, GIPHY, Pubmatic, Verizon Media, The Carter Center, Dartmouth, Eiropean Commission Joint Reasearch Centre, University of Michigan, XANDER, Open Web, and many, many more, found on page 47 of the PDF.
These individual companies make it possible for NewsGuard to target conservative independent news in an attempt to bankrupt them, leaving only the government "approved " news for Americans.
It is extremely interesting that Newsguard began in 2018, after Independent Media managed to bypass the MSM to get news out during the 2016 election campaign cycle which helped defeat Hillary Clinton.
The powers that be decided they were going to do everything possible to make sure that didn't happen agin.
It is also worth noting that the information about the government funding NewsGuard was way down on page 42 of 48 pages. Way to bury the lede.
BOTTOM LINE
We knew the government was coercing social media companies to remove content and censor conservatives, as there is a ruling at the moment barring the government from doing so.
We knew that federal agencies and the White House were flagging videos for removal, getting many YouTube users demonetized and/or accounts terminated.
It shouldn't surprise us that the government would figure out a way to shut off the revenue generation of websites that refused to stop asking questions and those that insisted on reporting news the MSM won't cover, and the government would prefer to not be reported.
Reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop, the dangers of experimental vaccines, masking, and all other topics that are "taboo" to the government funded NewsGuard has brought us to the point of needing readers' help just to survive and keep ANP online.
ANP Fundraiser: ‘Dangerous, Derogatory, Harmful, Unreliable!’Those are some of the exact words used by Google’s censors, aka 'Orwellian content police,' in describing many of our controversial stories. Stories later proven to be truthful and light years ahead of the mainstream media. But because we reported those 'inconvenient truths' they're still trying to hide, they pulled their ads from ANP.
