Meta will train its AI on far-right media outlet
This week, Newsmax — a far-right news organization with a strong allegiance to President Trump and a history of pushing wild conspiracy theories — announced it had struck a deal with Meta. Under the agreement, Meta will “draw upon Newsmax’s significant current reporting as well as archived content across its platforms to support AI queries across Meta’s apps and devices.” Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy said the company was “pleased to work with Meta to help ensure users have access to timely, high-quality journalism through AI technologies.”
Although Meta’s AI products are currently less popular than those of OpenAI and other rivals, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is investing hundreds of billions in data centers and other infrastructure to catch up. Zuckerberg is also aggressively integrating AI into Meta’s suite of apps, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which collectively have over 3.9 billion monthly users. In short, how Meta’s AI products are trained could have enormous impacts.
The financial terms of Meta’s deal with Newsmax were not disclosed.
Newsmax is not an objective news source but a far-right organization that routinely distorts reality to suit its ideological goals. NewsGuard, which uses journalists to rank the credibility and reliability of news outlets, gives Newsmax a 20 out of 100. Newsmax “is unreliable because it severely violates basic journalism standards,” NewsGuard concluded. Newsmax received similar ratings from Media Bias/Fact Check (”Low“ for factual reporting) and Ground News (”Very Low“ on factuality.)
Ruddy is a longtime friend and informal advisor of Trump. He is a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, where the pair frequently dine together. Ruddy was described in the Washington Post as a “pioneer of America’s looming misinformation complex — making a name for himself by pushing stories that badly lacked substantiating evidence.”
After the 2020 election, Ruddy praised Trump for attempting to undermine the credibility of the election, saying it made more people interested in the news. “You know what? At the end of the day, it’s great for news,” Ruddy told the New Yorker in November 2020. “The news cycle is red-hot, and Newsmax is getting one million people per minute, according to Nielsen, tuning into Newsmax TV. I think it’s good.”
Newsmax aggressively promoted the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, using the false claims to bolster ratings. For example, on November 16, 2020, Newsmax played a clip of lawyer Sidney Powell claiming there was “massive election fraud.” According to Powell, the fraud involved “Dominion and its Smartmatic software,” which allowed people to “drag and drop Trump votes to a separate folder and then delete that folder.”
Nearly a month later, Newsmax was still promoting Powell. On December 13, 2020, Mike Huckabee introduced Powell as someone who “says she has evidence of voter fraud on the biggest scale in world history.” Powell then claimed:
We also identified the fact that the Smartmatic Dominion people left VPNs wide open and unencrypted to allow access by all kinds of foreign actors, the night of the election. This election was manipulated by evil nations like China Communist Party, which owns 75% of the investment company that owns Dominion, and then, also by Iran, there were Serbian people in the system at the time. Lichtenstein, I mean, there were hackers all over in our own election system during the election.
Newsmax was ultimately sued by both Smartmatic and Dominion. The cases were settled for over $100 million combined after judges issued several rulings favorable to the plaintiffs. The 2020 election coverage that resulted in these settlements is part of the “archived content” that Meta will apparently be using “to support AI queries across Meta’s apps and devices.”
The AI-training deal with Newsmax is the latest by Meta with a right-wing outlet that pushed pro-Trump conspiracies. Meta has also agreed to train its AI on content from Fox News, which pushed election conspiracies and settled a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion for $787 million. It has made similar deals with other right-wing outlets with poor reputations for factual accuracy, including The Daily Caller, The Washington Examiner, and News Corp, the parent company of the New York Post. Meta has also included several mainstream outlets that provide centrist coverage, including USA Today, CNN, and People Inc.
Meta has no AI-training partnership with left-leaning outlets. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
Misinformation-maxxing
Newsmax has promoted misinformation on topics beyond the 2020 election.
In 2019 and 2020, according to the Washington Post, a member of the Qatari royal family invested about $50 million in Newsmax as the network was struggling to keep up with rival Fox News. Senior leadership instructed reporters to soften their coverage of Qatar and Ruddy reprimanded a host for a critical comment on air.
A 2021 report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate identified Newsmax as one of ten sites contributing to 69% of user interaction with climate misinformation on Facebook. According to the report, Newsmax was the third most common site linked to in posts containing climate misinformation. Newsmax has posted articles promoting conspiracy theories about chemtrails and denying that climate change is caused by humans. (Facebook objected to the report’s methodology.)
In 2014, Newsmax aired and promoted a film pushing conspiracy theories about John F. Kennedy’s assassination. An article on the film published by Newsmax states that it “presents compelling forensic and eyewitness evidence, previously unavailable to the public, supporting [Mafia hit man James] Files’ contention that he, and not Lee Harvey Oswald, fired the fatal shot at America’s 35th president.”
In addition to spreading misinformation, Newsmax has also silenced criticism of Trump.
During a September 2021 interview with an Iraq War veteran, Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield abruptly cut off his guest when he started to criticize Trump over his efforts to get U.S. citizens out of Afghanistan. Stinchfield attempted to interrupt the guest, but when he continued speaking, Stinchfield shouted, “Cut him off please, cut him off now!” The guest quickly disappeared from the broadcast.
More evidence that AI technology isn't neutral. If there's bias in the data it's fed or in how it's designed, it'll mirror that bias. What egregious for Meta dealing with Newsmax is that it’s making no pretense at neutrality. It's deliberately putting its thumb on the scale, and its AI output should be judged summarily by users as unreliable, assuming they even know about this relationship.
Early in the development of computer programming programmers coined the phrase "garbage in garbage out" to describe the fact that if you input flawed, biased or poor quality information, the output will be equally flawed, biased or poor quality information. Feeding people garbage is just part of meta Enshittification.