Florida’s chief financial officer took an axe to the censorship regime with a new directive barring state financial service contracts with media-monitoring services such as NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index.
Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis unveiled the proclamation Wednesday to ban agency partnerships with groups that deliver news credibility ratings that “are often rooted in political disagreements, subjective biases, and viewpoint discrimination, rather than factual inaccuracies, thereby amounting to censorship and blacklisting.” Such ratings have been weaponized to censor non-leftist content with misinformation labels for factual reporting on stories such as Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“No taxpayer money from my agency will fund censorship on my watch, and no Florida business should suffer simply because it expresses views that these groups don’t like,” Patronis said in a press release. “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.”
The directive prohibits the Department of Financial Services from brokering contracts with censorship services such as NewsGuard, one of the most popular web extensions that’s been deployed in K-12 classrooms across the country with the help of federal funding. NewsGuard rates the credibility of news organizations to redirect users to what the pro-censorship group’s administrators approve as credible. The censorship tool scored legacy outlets — such as Politico, NPR, and
