If NewsGuard has any integrity, they will publish our response in full. We believe the objective of NewsGuard is an exercise in futility, folly and vanity.
BitChute is the most reliable platform. And why is that true? Because we never stifle debate and the best way to have truth evolve is with more speech, not less free speech.
The concept of content moderation is subject to Type 1 and Type 2 errors and the cost of banning content that later proves to be true is socially, very costly. Many stories deemed reliable one day, are later to have been discovered to be unreliable.
NewsGuard wants to think and decide for others. BitChute users are smart. They can decide for themselves.
Please read the inquiry from NewsGuard and our response. In case they refuse to publish it or publish an edited version.
Thank you!
NewsGuard Inquiry Received By BitChute on March 26 2025:
Good morning,
I'm writing from NewsGuard, a company that rates news and information websites for reliability. We assess each site based on nine apolitical journalistic criteria and assign a 0-100 trust score based on those criteria. Our review process and criteria can be found here.
We are in the process of updating our review of Bitchute.com. I’ve attached a copy of our previous review of the site here for reference. As Bitchute.com is a platform, we do not assign the site a rating out of 100 as we normally do with news sites.
As you may recall from our prior correspondence, as a part of our review process, we contact the publication being rated to seek comment on any potential issues we find and to give the site a chance to point us to any information we may have missed.
Below we have some questions related to the platform. Please understand that these questions are not our conclusions; they are merely questions based on our research. Getting your perspective and response to them in order to understand if we have misconstrued something or are not aware of countervailing facts is an important part of our reporting process.
Our goal is to make sure our review is as fair, accurate, and thorough as possible. We will be sure to include any comments you have in response to the questions as part of our report so that readers can see your point of view. As such, please consider this and any additional correspondence with us to be on the record.
With that in mind, for your review, here are are our questions below:
We have questions about some statements in recent videos on the site.
For example, a March 2025 video titled, “The Rothschild's helped Zelensky to buy Milleis Banque, a French private investment bank,” purported to show a segment from a French TV news broadcast by a station called “TV12”. The video, which carried a “TV12” logo, showed a man standing in front of the private French bank Milleis Banque and stating in French, “The bank has been taken over by Maltext MultiCapital Corporation,” referencing a British Virgin Islands-registered company that Zelensky previously had a stake in before taking office in May 2019.
In fact, the video apparently is fabricated. NewsGuard did not find a station called “TV12” and the logo for “TV12” imitates the style and format of the logo for the authentic French TV channel TF1. The audio of the broadcaster in the video is apparently AI-generated, according to AI detection tool Hive.
There have been no credible news reports about a Milleis Banque sale. The video includes supposed purchase documents showing that the bank was acquired by Maltext MultiCapital Corporation. However, a search of France’s Official Bulletin of Civil and Commercial Advertisements, which publishes official corporate filings, found no records of such a transaction.
The bank’s CEO Nicolas Hubert told French state-owned international news channel France24 in a March 2025 statement, “The information in this so-called report is false.” According to the bank’s website and company statements, Milleis Banque is owned by AnaCap Financial Partners, a European financial services private equity firm that acquired the bank in 2017.
The video advancing the false narrative resembles previous campaigns by Storm-1516, a Russian influence operation.
Does Bitchute.com have any comment on this apparently countervailing information? Does Bitchute.com have any policies on hosting Russian disinformation?
A January 2025 video titled, “Official Study: Heart Attack Drugs in mRNA Jabs Set to Kill Billions in 2025” said that “Groundbreaking new peer-reviewed research, studiously ignored by the mainstream media, reveals the truth: the spike protein isn’t a miracle of modern science, it’s a cardiotoxin, silently attacking your heart. The chemicals in these vaccines were engineered with the precision of a thermobaric bomb—each component calibrated to set off a countdown. And that countdown? It’s ticking toward a heart attack.”
The “heart attack drugs” mentioned in the video’s headline referred to a part of the COVID virus called the spike protein. However, the COVID vaccines that rely on messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) do not contain spike proteins themselves, according to health experts As the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains in a page on its website, mRNA COVID vaccines include instructions for cells to make pieces of the spike protein, which in turn triggers a vaccine recipient’s immune system to create antibodies against the COVID virus.
Moreover, the “groundbreaking new peer-reviewed research” cited as evidence by the video was actually a December 2020 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature that showed that the COVID virus spike protein was able to cross the blood-brain barrier in mice. The study did not test the spike protein’s effect on the heart muscle or mention anything about heart attacks in its text.
Dr. William Banks, a co-author of the December 2020 study and neurologist and professor of medicine at the University of Washington, told NewsGuard in a January 2025 email that the study “primarily focused on the ability of the spike protein to enter the brain and thus be a mechanism by which SARS-CoV-2 [the virus that causes COVID] could produce CNS [Central Nervous System] symptoms. We also looked at uptake by some peripheral tissues, but the heart was not amongst those.”
COVID vaccines have been found, in rare cases, to cause myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle. However, multiple peer-reviewed studies have shown that mRNA COVID vaccines are not associated with an increased risk of heart attacks in humans.
Does Bitchute.com have any comment on this apparently countervailing information, and on this video?
A March 2025 video titled “This is the house of President Zelensky in Florida.....its 1 of his 15 homes” showed satellite imagery of a sprawling mansion in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, and featured a voiceover stating, “This is the house of Ukrainian President Zelensky. The mansion is worth 20 million dollars, located in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.”
In fact, Zelensky does not apparently own a beachfront mansion in Florida, contrary to repeated claims by pro-Kremlin sources. Fact checkers at Snopes, Agence-France Press (AFP), and USA Today searched Florida property records in all 67 of Florida’s counties, and reported that they did not find any properties listed in Zelensky’s name.
According to a March 2024 assets, income, and expenses declaration covering the year 2023, published online by Ukraine’s anti-corruption agency the National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP), Zelensky and his wife and two children own a total of 13 real estate assets. This includes six apartments in Ukraine, an apartment in the UK, a non-residential plot in Ukraine, and five parking spaces.
The property seen in the video is an authentic property located in Ponte Vedra Boulevard, Florida. The property was sold at auction in February 2024 for just over $7.5 million, news outlets in Jacksonville, Florida, reported. Local newspaper Jacksonville Daily Record reported that the house was sold by its previous owners, Daniel and Carol Wildermuth, to Florida business owners Manan and Vakta Gandhi.
A spokesperson for Platinum Luxury Auctions, the auction house that managed the sale, told NewsGuard that claims that the property is owned by Zelensky are “fake,” and that the property was “never associated with Zelensky at all.” Platinum also confirmed the names of the current and former owners of the property reported by the Jacksonville Daily Record.
Does Bitchute.com have any comment on this apparently countervailing information, and on this video?
NewsGuard identified numerous videos in March 2025 with the words “Hitler was right” in the title, which were viewable to an analyst in the EU without a VPN.
For example, an October 2025 video titled “#HitlerWasRight [JEWRY WANTS GERMANY TO PERISH]” featured a 1942 speech by Adolf Hitler, with English-language subtitles and assorted historical images and footage. In the speech, Hitler said, “It is clear to us that the war can only end with the destruction of the Germanic peoples or the disappearance of Jewry from Europe. … the result of this war will be the destruction of Jewry.” The video said in its description, “The ongoing & constant vilification & demonization of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich in the Jewish-controlled media is to prevent & discourage the disclosure of Hitler’s (German) Economic & Social miracle, which, during his reign, kicked out the parasitic influence of International Jewry.” The video description provided links to downloadable PDFs of books with the titles “National Socialism: Fundamentals” and “The Battle to Preserve Western Civilization.”
Does Bitchute.com have any comment on this video, and whether it violates Bitchute.com’s standards on content inciting hatred?
Other videos viewable in the EU with the words “Hitler was right” in the title include -
https://www.bitchute.com/video/6fhk4MrFhEm4
https://www.bitchute.com/video/tQxYUZ3ZtQgk
https://www.bitchute.com/video/ZrGgt6OfFGBh
https://www.bitchute.com/video/Dtqh4wlsUL5E
https://www.bitchute.com/video/WYZTA3l4hg9B
https://www.bitchute.com/video/9ETMqOk3iLUJ
Does Bitchute.com have any comment on these videos?
If there is information or context that would inform our understanding of any of the videos detailed above, we would be happy to include your response in the label.
In our review, we noticed that BitChute.com says on its Policies page that it is “a content sharing platform and associated services offered by Deep State Protcol [sic], LLC.” I was unable to find any U.S.-registered companies with this name.
Could you please provide more information about where the company is now based, and who are its current owners? Does the site disclose this information in a centralized location, such as on an About page or Contact page?
I would be glad to discuss these questions via phone or email and to discuss any questions you might have about NewsGuard and our rating process.
Thank you for your time and assistance,
Eva
Response From BitChute To NewsGuard:
Dear Eva,
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