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Welcome to Popular Information, a newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism.
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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.”
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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 leader