Editor’s Note: NewsGuard produces speech—ratings and reviews of news sites—rather than restricting speech. We therefore agree with the many quotes the BitChute team provided below emphasizing the importance of free speech, which our work relies on.

Response from BitChute.com Regarding NewsGuard Request for Comment: March 2025

We require that you include the entirety of this response as our right to reply.

After reviewing multiple sources regarding NewsGuard’s operations, I must express our rejection of its service. It appears that NewsGuard’s basic premise undermines the free speech right that everyone should enjoy, and BitChute categorically rejects all organizations that attempt to prevent people from exercising their fundamental, inalienable rights. Our concerns span government entanglement, a lack of transparency, algorithmic manipulation and impeding of people’s First Amendment rights. 

Edward Snowden said:  “What we’re really debating is not security versus liberty, it’s security versus surveillance. When we talk about electronic interception, the way that surveillance works is it preys on the weakness of protections that are being applied to all of our communications. The manner in which they’re protected.”

Whatever euphemisms that NewsGuard uses to describe its activities, by definition NewsGuard is an anti-First Amendment and pro-surveillance advocate. BitChute represents the antithesis: pro free speech, pro free reach, pro liberty and anti-surveillance. 

We take seriously, sincerely and earnestly our obligations to society and sought guidance.  In the name of transparency, which has been said to be the best disinfectant, here is the guidance we sought and aim to live up to:

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”  Benjamin Franklin

“To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”  Frederick Douglass

“Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.”  William O. Douglas 

“Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience (in this case, the judge or the jury) that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance.”  William O. Douglas

“Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.”  Louis Brandeis

“For if Men are to be precluded from offering their Sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences, that can invite the consideration of Mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of Speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.”  George Washington

“If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”  Louis Brandeis

“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”  John Stuart Mill

“No danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is an opportunity for full discussion. Only an emergency can justify repression.”  Louis Brandeis

“The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.”  Adlai Stevenson

“The Framers of the Constitution knew that free speech is the friend of change and revolution. But they also knew that it is always the deadliest enemy of tyranny.”

“A function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it invites a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it passes for acceptance of an idea.”  William O. Douglas

“As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.”  James Madison