Exclusive: DNSFilter censors some conservative media, including Blaze News

DNSFilter is a popular internet security service built to block malicious or misleading websites and thwart cyber threats. It is supposed to protect users. Instead, it is censoring some conservative media outlets, labeling them as “contentious” and “misinformation” so that users don’t see their content, and Blaze News is on the blacklist.

Earlier this week, we received a tip from a reader who said the reader couldn’t access Blaze News on a device with DNSFilter enabled. Naturally, we downloaded a free trial of the service and tested a litany of conservative and left-wing media. You’ll never guess what we found.

It is supposed to protect users. Instead, it is censoring some conservative media outlets.

Looking at 26 popular conservative media outlets, five websites were met with a content warning, stating that each domain “is blocked because it's associated with the Contentious & Misinformation category.” These five sites were:

• Blaze News
• the Daily Caller
• One America News Network
• The Federalist
• RedState

DNSFilter blocks Blaze Media/Zach Laidlaw

As for the rest of conservative media at large, big names like the Daily Wire, Breitbart, Turning Point USA, Fox News, and the Babylon Bee were all permitted without any content warnings.

Naturally, we wanted to know if this phenomenon extended to the other side of the media aisle. Maybe we weren’t alone.

First, we tested several corporate sites, including CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. All of them made it through DNSFilter, despite their track records for spinning stories.

The real test would be how DNSFilter responded to the openly contentious sites on the left. If these outlets weren’t blocked, clearly we had evidence of bias within the "contentious & misinformation" category. Sadly, our hunch was correct. When navigating to the Guardian, Slate, and Vice, all three sites directed straight to the homepage without an alert. They were all allowed.

By the time our test concluded, not a single left-wing media site on our list was blocked.

RELATED: Government funded a weapon to fight terrorism — and then tested it on Blaze Media

L-R: Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images; Scott Olson/Getty Images

This isn’t the first time Blaze News has been caught up in a mass censorship campaign. If you recall, we moved to a subscription model in 2023 after Big Tech suppressed our content and stifled our ad revenue. Thankfully, readers like you support our work so that we can continue to cover stories like these. Thank you.

Blaze News was also among several conservative sites that were blacklisted by NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index in an effort to demonetize us and kick us off the internet. To these organizations' chagrin, we survived. Needless to say, we’ve been here before, and we’re exposing all of it.

Armed with evidence, Blaze News has contacted DNSFilter for comment. We wanted to know why the service targeted specific conservative media outlets while leaving others on both sides of the aisle untouched. We did not receive a response before the deadline.

We did, however, receive a comment from Amber Duke, the editor in chief of the Daily Caller:

Secretly blacklisting legitimate news organizations as "misinformation" is exactly the kind of censorship that fueled the rise of independent and new media. Americans are sick of Big Tech gatekeepers telling them what they’re allowed to read. If this company has decided to summarily block our content, it needs to explain who made that decision and why.

If you use DNSFilter, you can whitelist Blaze News by going to the Policies page in your account. Select Filtering and edit your policy. On the allow list, add “TheBlaze.com” and save.

If you don’t have access to your DNSFilter settings, please ask your administrator to follow the directions above. Alternatively, the administrator can disable the “contentious & misinformation” category altogether. Clearly it is incorrect, biased, or both.

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