This is part of a Washington Examiner investigative series on self-styled “disinformation” tracking groups that are blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media outlets. Here is where you can read stories in the series.
The Washington Examiner has continued to detail how the Global Disinformation Index, a British organization with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups, is secretly feeding conservative website blacklists to advertising companies with the intent of shutting down disfavored speech. As part of that series, this story will walk through what GDI has claimed constitutes as “disinformation” in public reports, memos, and interviews.
GDI has come under fire from Republican members of Congress, such as House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), ever since the Washington Examiner’s first story on Feb. 9. The story walked through the disinformation monitor’s secret blacklist and was published shortly before it was also revealed that the State Department has funded GDI, raising concerns among First Amendment lawyers.
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“To reduce disinformation, we need to remove the financial incentive to create it,” says GDI on its website. “Brands unwittingly provide an estimated quarter of a billion dollars annually to disinformation websites through online advertisements placed on them. GDI uses both human and artificial intelligence to assess disinformation risk across the open web. We then provide these risk ratings to brands and advertising technology partners, providing them with a trusted and neutral source of data with which to direct their advertising spend.”
The “dynamic exclusion list” of at least 2,000 websites that GDI compiles includes the Washington Examiner and likely a variety of other conservative websites, such as those they label as the 10 “riskiest” news outlets, according to a GDI board member who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The “riskiest” are the New York Post, the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, and Reason, according to public memos.
These conservative websites were ranked with oversight from GDI’s leaders, CEO Clare Melford and Executive Director Daniel Rogers, as well as its advisory panel. A team of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin was asked to evaluate the “operational policies” of outlets and document those pushing allegedly “misleading or sensationalist content,” according to GDI.
“Every site displayed some degree of bias or sensationalism in their content,” says GDI on its website. “Importantly, bias doesn’t mean having an opinion about an issue. Biased writing tells only part of a story; it focuses on or plays up one particular angle or piece of information and prevents readers from getting an accurate take on the events at hand.”
On the flip side, GDI says that the 10 “least risky” websites are the Wall Street Journal, NPR, ProPublica, the Associated Press, Insider, the New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, Buzzfeed News, and HuffPost, according to a 27-page report. HuffPost, which has published content promoting the false narrative that a 2020 New York Post story based on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop was “Russian disinformation,” received a “low” score because it “featured fact-based, unbiased content free from sensational text or visuals,” according to GDI.
GDI “views disinformation through the lens of adversarial narrative conflict,” meaning it determines that false information is “when someone pushes an intentionally misleading narrative which is adversarial against democratic institutions, scientific consensus or an at-risk group — and which carries a risk of harm,” according to its website.
This “adversarial narrative conflict” lens has even led to GDI flagging opinion articles as “disinformation.” For instance, the group has taken aim at an October 2022 Washington Examiner commentary article titled “Why are liberal women so unhappy?”
The piece cited social science research from 2022 that found that left-leaning men and women are less “satisfied” than conservative men and women. GDI labeled it in a January report as “misogyny” disinformation and criticized Trivago, a German technology company, for running an ad on the article.
GDI’s January report also flagged other content on conservative websites as alleged disinformation. The Federalist published a November 2022 op-ed titled “How Conservative Men Can Help Solve The GOP’s Single Women Problem” that GDI said was “misogyny.” GDI’s document also criticized Urban Outfitters for hosting an ad on the article.
“‘Disinformation, Inc.’ is a direct threat to this country — an effort by powerful members of the regime to silence dissent, chill debate, and keep Americans from their ongoing search for truth and information,” tweeted Mollie Hemingway, the Federalist’s editor-in-chief, on Feb. 9 in response to the Washington Examiner’s GDI reporting.
RedState, a conservative blog, had two articles labeled as “misogyny.” They were a June 2021 piece titled “Women Want to Know Why Men Don’t Want to Marry Anymore … Allow Me” and a September 2022 article titled “The Left’s Hypocrisy About Men’s Emotions Is on Full Display.” GDI noted in the report that ads were run in the articles by Oakley and 1&1, a web hosting company.
Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, thinks efforts by left-leaning groups to track purported disinformation are just cloaked censorship of “opinions and ideologies they oppose.”
“Rather than confront the debater, they seek to censor them, which is unfortunate,” Fitton told the Washington Examiner. “Any company suppressing content based on complaints by left-wing ideologues is an abuse. These companies need to be held accountable for getting into bed with these leftists under the guise of disinformation moderation. They’re pretending this is a neutral practice. It’s all about politics.”
GDI’s CEO provided further information about what the group views as “disinformation” in a March 2022 podcast episode hosted by the Safety Tech Innovation Network, a British government-backed group.
Melford noted that disinformation “is not an event” but rather “a process that happens over time” and can pertain to content that creates an “adversarial relationship” when it comes to “people of a certain gender or color, or ethnicity, or religion, or sexuality.”
Second, Melford said that disinformation could be content that is adversarial against “the media, the judiciary, the police, [or] a democratically-elected government.” Thirdly, disinformation could be a narrative “against science itself,” such as “COVID disinformation,” anti-vaccine content, or “climate change denial,” according to the CEO.
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“So, yes, freedom of speech is crucial,” she added. “But no, it is not always unfettered. And in no one’s constitution is there a right to profit from your speech — that is not enshrined in law anywhere. The current debate around disinformation, the solutions to disinformation, has been far too focused on content removal or content moderation.”
Click here to read the Washington Examiner’s “Disinformation Inc.” series.
