Proposed Act Bans Federal Funding for NewsGuard and Disinformation Index Over Speech Rating Activities

This bill, officially titled the Protect the First Amendment Act, is short, punchy, and takes direct aim at specific organizations involved in rating online speech. Essentially, it prohibits the federal government from giving grants, contracts, or any funding to certain companies and non-profits if their main job is to rate the credibility of domestic organizations based on what those organizations "lawfully say." They trigger the ban if they claim to evaluate this speech as misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation.

The Hit List: Who Gets Cut Off?

This isn't a broad, future-looking policy; it’s highly targeted. The bill (SEC. 2) explicitly names two specific entities: NewsGuard Technologies, Inc. and the various Disinformation Index entities (including Disinformation Index, Inc., Disinformation Index, Ltd., or Global Disinformation Index gUG). If these organizations engage in the specified "covered behavior," they are blacklisted from receiving federal money. But the ban doesn't stop there. It also applies to any tax-exempt 501(c)(3) non-profit that engages in the same activities.

What Counts as 'Covered Behavior'?

Think of "covered behavior" as the tripwire for the funding ban. It’s defined as any activity whose primary purpose is to either demonitize or rate the credibility of a U.S. organization based on its lawful speech. The key connection is that they are doing this under the guise of evaluating whether the speech is "misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation." Basically, if you are a non-profit or one of the named companies whose core business is giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to domestic speech based on perceived truthfulness, you lose access to government funds.

The Real-World Impact: Penalizing Analysis

For the named organizations, this bill is a direct financial penalty on their business model, especially if they rely on federal contracts or grants to fund their research and operations. If you’re one of the many non-profits that works on media literacy or evaluating content credibility—maybe through a Department of Education grant or a contract with a federal agency—you might have to choose between your core mission and federal funding. This is the government essentially saying, "If you rate speech, we won't pay you." This raises significant questions about whether the government is using its funding power to punish specific types of analysis, potentially chilling the work of independent speech evaluators.

The Bigger Picture: Targeting Specific Players

It’s highly unusual for legislation to single out specific private companies by name. While the bill’s title suggests it’s protecting the First Amendment, the mechanism it uses is a financial sanction against entities whose job is to analyze speech. For everyday folks, this bill might seem distant, but it touches on who gets to decide what information is credible online. If the government starts financially penalizing entities for providing third-party analysis, it could affect the ecosystem of information we rely on—especially if those entities were providing tools or services to other organizations that help filter out bad actors or deceptive content. The bill attempts to protect certain domestic speech from being rated, but it does so by financially limiting the speech (the analysis) of the rating entities themselves.