The following is an excerpt from best-selling author Steven Brill’s The Death of Truth, to be published on June 4, in which Brill draws in part on his experience as the cofounder of NewsGuard to explain the forces that have created a chaotic, polarized world in which the truth—the shared belief in basic facts—that allows democracies and civil society to function has been so severely eroded. NewsGuard rates the reliability of websites and associated online media and has covered everything from healthcare hoaxes to Russian disinformation campaigns.
In early 2023, NewsGuard reported on a documentary produced by the FSB Russian security service and carried on its YouTube-affiliated channels in the lead-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The completely fake documentary depicted a lab run by the United States in Ukraine that was producing bioweapons to be targeted at Russia.
The fake Russian FSB bioweapons claim had not received much attention initially when it was posted in December 2021 on the YouTube account of someone named John Dougan. However, the “report” about the supposed weapons lab, pre-positioned online three months before the Russian invasion, was then cited by Russian officials in explaining to their countrymen and the world the urgent need for the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. When NewsGuard reported a year later that YouTube had never taken down videos pushing Russian propaganda, despite its promises when the war started to do so, YouTube finally removed those that NewsGuard had listed, including the bioweapons lab video. Dougan and the Russian FSB security service were apparently not pleased. They launched a series of threats against me directed at my home in New York.
On Friday, March 10, 2023, a thirty-one-minute video was posted on YouTube with the headline “US Govt Using 3rd Parties to Censor Free Speech and Spread Disinformation!” Reading from a teleprompter and sitting in front of a backdrop showing photos of what appeared to be scenes of war-caused carnage, the narrator, Dougan, began by accusing the U.S. government of spreading massive amounts of disinformation. Speaking calmly, with a plain American accent, and clearly at ease using the teleprompter, he then explained that a new enemy was assisting the American government in its disinformation campaigns.
“With the advent of social media,” he said, “it’s becoming harder for the US government to pull the wool over the eyes of the American people, and so they need a mechanism to quash dissenting opinions and the presentation of facts. . . . They are pressuring social media companies to engage in egregious acts of censorship.”
One of the government’s weapons for applying that pressure, Dougan declared, was NewsGuard—“a company that is . . . engaged in a smear campaign against me and fellow YouTuber Mike Jones, pressuring YouTube to have our content removed.”
That content, he explained, included “revelations” in a recent video report that he and Jones had done featuring what he said was an undercover “walk-through” of a bioweapons lab in Ukraine financed by American pharmaceutical companies. “Yes, we were there,” he said. He also talked about “my October 4 revelations” that he had filmed of “American navy divers seen under very suspicious circumstances” in the North Sea just before the Nord Stream gas pipeline was blown up. And he reminded viewers of a third report he had done in December 2020 purporting to document the U.S.-run bioweapons labs in Ukraine. That video, he said, showed his journalism skills because he was “ahead of the curve” in reporting what the Russians only revealed four months later when, citing Dougan’s earlier YouTube documentary, the Kremlin used the weapons lab as a key rationale for invading Ukraine.
In other words, Dougan’s trailblazing, independent journalism—achieved, he said, because “we are in a position to travel to places where other Western journalists refused to go and where they refuse to report on”—had informed Russia and the world about the bioweapons threat in Ukraine.
Contrary to Dougan’s claim, NewsGuard was not acting on behalf of the U.S. government, nor had it pressured YouTube to do anything. But NewsGuard had issued that report nineteen days before Dougan taped this YouTube video. It was headlined, “Full-length Russian propaganda films justifying the war proliferate on YouTube, despite the platform’s ban on Russian state-funded media.” The report revealed that since the Russian invasion of Ukraine had begun a year earlier, the Russian propaganda outlet RT had produced fifty films spreading disinformation on “more than 100” YouTube channels about Ukraine and the war. The films included false reports that Ukraine committed genocide against Russian speakers in Ukraine’s Donbas region, that Western sanctions against Russia following the invasion have had little effect on Russia’s economy while devastating the economies of Western countries, and that “Nazism” is rampant in Ukraine. These were elaborately produced videos, billed as documentaries.