“The philanthropy of Democratic megadonor George Soros cut a large check last year to the charity arm in the United States of a group blacklisting conservative media from advertising dollars, ” reports the Washington Examiner. “The Soros-backed Foundation to Promote Open Society, a major grantmaking organization, sent $250,000 in 2023 to Disinformation Index, Inc., the American outpost of the Global Disinformation Index. That British group, which previously received $150,000 from Soros along with funding from the State Department, has faced ‘censorship’ scrutiny from Congress ever since a series of Washington Examiner reports shed light on its efforts to defund news outlets in the U.S.”
The Global Disinformation Index defines “disinformation” to include factually correct information that gives people an adversarial attitude toward the government or minority groups. It labeled two factually-accurate Liberty Unyielding blog posts about crime as disinformation. For example, when a black lawyer accurately noted that the crime rate is higher among blacks than whites, his blog post “Jailing Violent Criminals Is Appropriate,” was labeled by the Global Disinformation Index as “white supremacy content” that companies should not advertise next to. The blog post was classified as hateful, even though it cited federal crime statistics and a Supreme Court ruling noting that crime rates are indeed different for blacks and whites. The blog post also noted that Asians have a lower rate of misbehavior than whites, yet it was still classified as “white supremacist.” The blog post was absolutely correct that the black crime rate is higher than the crime rate for other races. As the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics noted in Homicide Trends in the United States, “Blacks are disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders….The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).”
The fact that the blog post was factually accurate did not matter to the Global Disinformation Index, because it classifies factually-accurate information as “disinformation” if it fuels “adversarial narratives.” As the New York Sun notes, the London-based “Global Disinformation Index defines ‘disinformation’ as narratives that are ‘adversarial’ to democratic institutions” — that is, the government — “or at-risk groups.” “The government-funded Global Disinformation Index’s stated mission is to stifle ‘disinformation’ it defines as ‘factually correct’ & ‘adversarial narratives’ (like the Covid-19 lab leak),” notes Matt Orfalea.
“Reports by GDI warned advertisers to blacklist news sites that attempted to blame the” COVID-19 “pandemic on a lab leak, and implied that any website asserting a cover-up on the part of the Chinese government was promoting racist disinformation with the capacity of harming Asian people,” reports Reason Magazine. “GDI’s messaging on the lab leak theory was clear and consistent: News websites that explored this topic should be demonetized….GDI alleged in a February 2020 report dubbed ‘Coronavirus: The makings of a disinformation pandemic?’ that ‘adversarial narratives’ are emerging as a key ‘disinformation tactic.'”
But the lab leak actually happened. The “U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak,” as has the FBI, notes the Wall Street Journal.
No matter how true something is, if it is “ideologically motivated” and “create[s] a risk of harm” by “targeting at-risk individuals or institutions,” it is deemed disinformation by the Global Disinformation Index.
GDI claimed that the 10 “riskiest” news outlets for disinformation are the New York Post, Reason, the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, and RealClearPolitics. These are all either conservative publications that criticize the Biden administration, except for Reason, a libertarian magazine that criticizes civil-liberties violations by both Democrats and Republicans, and RealClearPolitics, a political news and polling-data aggregator.
Its explanation for giving these publications bad ratings does not even suggest that most of them made factually false claims. GDI’s explanation of its rating for the New York Post admitted that “GDI’s study did not review specific high-profile stories and attempt to determine whether they were disinformation.” The closest it came to asserting factual inaccuracy was in explaining its rating of the American Conservative, which it alleged — without any specific examples — was prone to “unsubstantiated claims” and “logical fallacies.”
By contrast, GDI gave high ratings to left-wing publications such as HuffPost that frequently make false claims and engage in slanted, sensationalistic coverage. GDI’s co-founder, Clare Melford, wrote for HuffPost in the past. GDI claimed that “HuffPost largely featured fact-based, unbiased content free from sensational text or visuals. This domain also refrained from perpetuating divisive narratives…” It claimed that the “ten lowest risk online news outlets” included Huffpost, Buzzfeed News, NPR, ProPublica, the Associated Press, Insider, the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post.
As the New York Post notes, these left-leaning publications given good ratings by GDI are all friendlier to the Biden administration: “The outlets it labels less risky — NPR, BuzzFeed, the AP, The New York Times and the like — are all those that happily parrot whatever actual disinfo comes from the White House or other corridors of power, up to and including the 100% fake Steele Dossier.” GDI has nothing bad to say about left-wing news outlets that have committed libel or journalistic hoaxes, such as Rolling Stone, which peddled a gang rape hoax and had to pay $1.65 million to settle a defamation lawsuit against it.
As Jacob Sullum pointed out in the Chicago Sun-Times, the Global Disinformation Index’s methodology is rife with contradictions. It claims that “disinformation” is inherently “intentionally misleading” yet its “its ‘risk’ ratings do not require any actual examples of inaccurate reporting, let alone deliberate misrepresentations” by the web sites it gives bad ratings to in its Disinformation Index. According to GDI, a bad rating does not even require proof of “intent to deceive” because, GDI says, that “cannot be directly measured.” Nor does it even require a showing that a news outlet has made a claim that “at the very least,” is factually “false,” because that, GDI claims, is “extremely difficult to assess at scale” and because “a statement that is technically true can be presented out of context in a misleading and harmful way.”
In short, GDI labels news outlets as “intentionally” deceptive even when they say nothing untrue, and have no “intent to deceive.”
Despite the shoddy, contradictory nature of GDI’s ratings, its ratings have been used by major advertising firms to exclude the news outlets GDI gave bad ratings to, such as the Daily Wire. One major internet ad agency, Xandr, told companies last year that it was “partnering with the Global Disinformation Index (‘GDI’) and will be adopting their exclusion list.” Former State Department official Mike Benz says that the fiscal impact of these blacklists was “devastating.” He says “ad revenue crushing sentinels” like the Global Disinformation Index have “crippled the potential of alternative news sources to compete on an even economic playing field with approved media outlets.
Earlier, the Washington Examiner reported:
The Department of State has funded a deep-pocketed “disinformation” tracking group that is secretly blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news organizations vital advertising dollars…The Global Disinformation Index, a British organization … is feeding blacklists to ad companies with the intent of defunding and shutting down websites peddling alleged “disinformation”…This same “disinformation” group has received $330,000 from two State Department-backed entities linked to the highest levels of government, raising concerns from First Amendment lawyers and members of Congress….
GDI compiles a “dynamic exclusion list” that it feeds to corporate entities, such as the Microsoft-owned advertising company Xandr, emails show. Xandr and other companies are, in turn, declining to place ads on websites that GDI flags as peddling disinformation.
The Washington Examiner revealed on Thursday that it is on this exclusion list. The list includes at least 2,000 websites and has “had a significant impact on the advertising revenue that has gone to those sites,” said GDI’s CEO Clare Melford on a March 2022 podcast….
The federal government could run into legal trouble depending on the extent to which it’s paying or directing GDI to “censor information, pressure publications to censor, or pressure advertisers not to publish, in a way that harms U.S. citizens or companies,” Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, told the Washington Examiner.
