Disinformation-tracking groups “are part of a stealth operation blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media,” writes investigative journalist Gabe Kaminsky for the Washington Examiner. According to his report published on Thursday, February 9th, these supposedly non-partisan organizations are feeding blacklists of right-wing websites—and other news media—to major ad companies with the aim of “defunding disfavored speech,” as leaked documentation shows.
The story is simple: brands that want to advertise their products online turn to giant ad companies. These ad companies want to avoid advertising on sites with questionable reputations for fear of their clients being canceled, so in turn, they contract “disinformation trackers” to obtain private information about potentially dangerous websites “they should purportedly defund.”
One of the groups behind this is the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), whose mission is to “remove the financial incentive” to create “disinformation.” The organization compiles a secretive “dynamic exclusion list” of news outlets it deems to have a high risk of spreading disinformation, a list intended to severely impact the outlets’ advertising revenue. Just as a side note, George Soros’ Open Society Foundation and the U.S. State Department-backed National Endowment for Democracy are both listed among the founders of GDI.
Among the ten outlets on GDI’s “riskiest” list are The American Conservative, The Spectator, Real Clear Politics, The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and The New York Post—all of which skew to the Right. Some ad companies, such as Xandr, have adopted GDI’s exclusion list to punish content they deem “morally reprehensible or patently offensive” or that “could include false or misleading information.”
GDI flagging political opinions as disinformation is much less surprising, after taking a look at the advisory panel behind the development of its exclusion list. Among the journalists, academics, and data scientists on board, we find Ben Nimmo, Facebook’s global lead for threat intelligence, and liberal journalist Anne Applebaum, who actively downplayed the importance of Hunter Biden’s laptop story, for instance.
As it turns out, suppressing conservative voices is quite a lucrative business too, as funding pours into disinformation tracking via public avenues—mostly from the U.S. State Department and its partner institutions. GDI’s non-profit in San Antonio, for instance, raked in $345,000 in revenue in 2020, while its affiliated private foundation saw revenue rise from $19,600 to more than $569,000 in just one year.
The report suggests that these developments are effectively preventing alternative news sources from competing on an even, economic playing field with mainstream legacy outlets, most of whom are bulwarks of the Democratic Party’s liberal worldview.
“It’s devastating,” Mike Benz, ex-deputy assistant for information policy in the U.S. State Department told the Washington Examiner. “The implementation of ad revenue-crushing sentinels like Newsguard, Global Disinformation Index, and the like has completely crippled the potential of alternative news sources to compete on an even economic playing field with approved media outlets like CNN and the New York Times.”
According to GDI’s CEO, Clare Melford, there are more than 2,000 websites on GDI’s exclusion list. In a Safety Tech podcast episode, Melford also detailed some of the major “disinformation narratives” specifically targeted by GDI in the past couple of years. These include content regarding COVID-19 and vaccination concerns, mask protests, abortion, alleged voter fraud in the 2020 election, and even the general idea “that there’s a corrupt elite working only for themselves.”
