The British Government is helping to fund a widespread international attack on free speech by trying to disrupt online advertising revenues for many right-of-centre publications. The state money is funnelled through the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to a British outfit called the Global Disinformation Index (GDI). This circulates a ‘blocklist’ of mostly conservative publications, which in the U.S. includes the American Spectator. The GDI makes no secret of wanting to put these news publishers out of business. It says its goal is to “disrupt their advertising-funded business models by encouraging brands, suppliers and ad tech vendors to blocklist them”.
Apart from the support of the British taxpayer, the GDI is funded by the U.S. State Department via the National Endowment for Democracy and a group of wealthy foundations including the left-wing Knight Foundation. It also boasts the support of a number of journalists on its Advisory Panel, including Anne Applebaum, as well as Tortoise Media, an online news publisher, and senior personnel at the Poynter Institute and the Reuters Institute of Journalism. The Washington Examiner reports that the GDI has at least 2,000 websites on its exclusion list.
The GDI recently published a list of the 10 ‘riskiest’ and ‘least risky’ U.S. news websites. The 10 riskiest all belong to right-of-centre news publishers including the American Spectator, the American Conservative, Newsmax, the Federalist, Real Clear Politics and the Daily Wire. The least risky sites include the New York Times, USA Today, AP News, BuzzFeed News and the Washington Post. Interestingly, the Murdoch-owned New York Post is on the riskiest list. It was the only mainstream newspaper in the U.S. that publicised the Hunter Biden laptop story, ahead of the U.S. presidential election in 2020. This information was blocked by most social media companies at the time, and recently Applebaum said she didn’t think the laptop story “qualified as a major story”. Bizarrely, the Huffington Post is included in the 10 ‘least risky’ category, even though it published stories saying the laptop story was a “smear campaign” and had probably originated in Russia. Surely, that’s misinformation?
Also in the 10 riskiest is Reason, which Senior Editor Robby Sauve isn’t happy about. As he wrote last week, Reason was not given an opportunity to respond to any of the GDI’s reservations about it before it included it on its ‘blocklist’, has not made its full evaluation publicly available and refused to respond to requests from Robby for comment. He concludes:
If a self-described disinformation-tracking organisation wants to loudly proclaim, in partisan fashion, that advertisers should only use mainstream and liberal news sites, it has that right. But advertisers should take note of its obvious bias, total lack of transparency in detailing media outlets’ scores, and other methodological issues. And the State Department certainly has no business helping to fund it.
One of the reasons the GDI poses such a threat to free speech is that its definition of ‘disinformation’ is unusually capacious. It doesn’t just mean information that’s false and disseminated by people who know its false and have malevolent intentions. It has broadened the definition to include what it calls “adversarial narratives”. Thus the use of the term ‘illegal alien’ by Breitbart in its crime reporting is classified as disinformation and, presumably, any news website using it risks appearing on the ‘blocklist’. (The correct term, obviously, is ‘undocumented immigrant’.) ‘Illegal alien’ is ‘adversarial’, we’re told, because it transcends “simple true verses false dichotomies”, by which I think GDI means it’s legitimate to classify the use of the term as ‘disinformation’ even if it’s applied to somebody who literally is an illegal alien. “Each individual story would likely fact check to be technically correct, in that the crime did happen and the alleged perpetrator was likely an undocumented immigrant,” reports Danny Rogers, the Executive Director of the GDI, when referring to the suspect stories in Breitbart. Nevertheless, websites using the term should be demonetised because it is integral to an “adversarial narrative” that poses a “risk of harm to vulnerable populations or institutions”.
What institutions is the GDI classifying as “vulnerable”? The Democratic Party? Is Anne Applebaum, a regular contributor to the Spectator, really advising an organisation trying to suppress journalism that poses a threat to vulnerable institutions? In 1972, would the Nixon Whitehouse have been classed as a vulnerable institution and would the GDI, had it been around back then, have tried to stop Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward publishing an “adversarial narrative” about the then President?
“Vulnerable populations” is more straightforward. It’s all the usual suspects, including the “LGBTQ+ community”. For those unclear about what sort of disinformation poses a “risk of harm” to that community, the GDI has helpfully published some examples, such as the following:
Increasing numbers of young people who identify as transgender is proof that identifying as such is a social choice rather than a naturally occurring state.
So, attributing the rising number of young people identifying as transgender to social factors – as the respected medical researcher Dr. Lisa Littman has done (see this peer-reviewed paper, for instance) – is disinformation? I wonder if the researchers at the GDI, who’ve presumably carried out an exhaustive review of the research literature on gender dysphoria, can explain why the rise in teenage girls identifying as transgender is so much higher than the rise in teenage boys? After all, if gender dysphoria is “a naturally occurring state”, why does it disproportionately affect women? This can be seen in referrals to the Tavistock clinic between 2009/10 and 2018/19. According to data collected by Transgender Trend: “In less than a decade there has been a 1,460% increase in referrals of boys and a staggering 5,337% increase in girls.”
Other material the GDI seeks to block includes anything that challenges the scientific or medical ‘consensus’ on climate change and the mRNA vaccines – describing them as “experimental” is disinfo, apparently. Questioning the prevailing orthodoxy on these subjects, according to the GDI, creates a “risk of harm by undermining trust in science”. To mitigate this risk, the GDI says its mission is clear: “to defund online sources of disinformation”
Of course, all this is a blatant attack on free speech – trying to create a world where only the opinions and biases of the Washington Post, the BBC and the Guardian are allowed to flourish. “It’s devastating,” says Mike Benz, the State Department’s ex-Deputy Assistant for Internal Communications and Information Policy. He told the Washington Examiner that “the implementation of 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.”
However, the fightback seems to have started. The Daily Sceptic recently reported that the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a free speech-killing outfit run by a number of media operations including the BBC, Reuters, Associated Press and the Washington Post, has been hit with an antitrust lawsuit in Texas. This charges that the consortium suppressed “wholly accurate and legitimate reporting” to further its members’ economic interests. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of a number of online publishers by the late President Kennedy’s nephew, Robert Kennedy Jr. His suit alleges that suppressing online information that challenges prevailing narratives – ‘adversarial’ content, you might call it – deprives people of vital information about matters of legitimate public concern including the lockdowns, safety information about the mRNA vaccines and the Hunter Biden laptop story.
TNI connects Big Media with Big Tech – its members include Google and Facebook – and acts as a gatekeeper for what it counts as dis and misinformation. It’s Big Tech members remove, or seek to remove, so-called dis and misinformation on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, although the latter has recently become a less willing partner in attempts to suppress dissent. The Kennedy lawsuit says it is taking legal action to “defend the freedom of speech and the press”.
Proving damages in an antitrust case is not without considerable difficulties in the U.S. courts, but another line of attack would be to sue one of these self-styled gatekeepers for libel in the U.K. The GDI makes no secret of the fact that it is accusing many right-of-centre news publishers of disseminating “intentionally misleading” stories that are, in some cases, motivated by financial self-interest. Other stories are said to be “aimed at fostering long-term social, political or economic conflict”, as if that could be the only possible motive for challenging woke dogma on issues like the surge in gender dysphoria among teenage girls.
British libel law is partly based on past notions of a Gentleman’s Honour. An action can be brought for any published statement which is alleged to defame and cause loss of trade or reputational damage. Unlike the rest of British law, where initial innocence is assumed, the alleged defamatory statement is presumed to be false, unless the defendant can prove it to be true. Damages are awarded, sometimes on an aggravated basis, for any financial losses that have resulted from the libel. The GDI must be aware of this risk, not only to itself but also to the institutions that fund it, given that it’s registered in the U.K. Many third party funders and supporters are identified on its website and it’s possible that an aggressive litigant(s) could seek to add them to any writ.
Your correspondent is an old school journalist and of course would not wish to encourage anyone to sue in the British libel courts. But it would be interesting to see if a justification of suppressing content and labelling it disinformation, not because it’s false, but because it supposedly poses a threat to ‘at risk’ identity groups and vulnerable institutions would make headway on the brutal adversarial stage of the Royal Courts of Justice.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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They sure do seem to want to kill off all the older folks by continually “boosting” them. It might save them from having to increase the pension age.
Ah, is that a solution (albeit rather a final one) to France’s problem of having to raise the pension age from 62?
Nothing to do with excess deaths for under-50s….
Excess deaths for under-50s are much harder to explain away, excess deaths for over-50s can be hidden or ignored or explained away more easily.
It isn’t what they aren’t saying. Its the way they aren’t saying it..
Exactly. These decisions are supposed to be based on risk/benefit analysis. Why don’t they explain what that was, and why don’t they explain why they withdrew the AstraZeneca jab?
‘Why don’t they explain why they withdrew the AstraZeneca jab?’
That is a VERY good point that has been totally ignored by the MSM and the entire political class. Its as if all the razzmatazz around ‘the UK’s covid vaccine’ never happened. Its just been wiped from history entirely. Its never mentioned at all now.
I think its a good angle for us sceptics to take – we need to start asking (very innocently) ‘Why was the AZ vaccine withdrawn?’ at every possible occasion.
Please see my email to Andrew Pollard, Chief Investigator on the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine trials, and Chair of the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, asking who initiated the plan to vaccinate the entire global population against SARS-CoV-2 when it was already known it wasn’t a serious threat to most people?
My email to Andrew Pollard, sent in June 2021, raises serious questions about the ethics process which approved covid-19 vaccine trials involving healthy people not at risk of covid-19.
It’s time for retrospective critical analysis of how the current global covid-19 jab rollout came to pass…
i think we all have a pretty good idea of some of the reasons behind this, but as I’ve said elsewhere it’s still worth asking why the crooks behaved like crooks. At least they can’t say they weren’t told. The people who did approve this plan should have bullet proof reasons as to why they didn’t give equal weight to independent medical organisations such as the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service (who promoted vitamin C, vitamin D etc. to protect against viral infection), and that conflict of interest was absolutely not a factor. And even if they get that far, there still may be questions to answer.
Because the msm are now as corrupt as the AZ described by Oliver Wright (now working for the Times muppets) in his 2014 Independent piece (see here and here)
Big Pharma lobbyists exploit patients and doctors | The Independent | The Independent
Revealed: Big Pharma’s hidden links to NHS policy, with senior MPs saying medical industry uses ‘wealth to influence government’ | The Independent | The Independent
The COVID-19 vaccination programme continues to reduce severe disease across the population
Read: The so-called COVID-19 vaccination does not protect against severe disease.
while helping to protect the NHS
Against the threat of budget cuts, perhaps? The NHS is supposed to use medication to help people and not to help itself to something.
Beat me to it https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/01/25/covid-vaccine-booster-jab-nhs-uk-end/
Prof Lim should be awarded the ”Dipshit of the Year” award, as should anybody else falling for this total cobblers in 2023.
“The U.K. will continue to offer the first two doses to over-16s.” Oooh hang on a minute..isn’t that the one that’s based on the original Wuhan strain that has been extinct for 2 years now?
“Hmmm you know what? I’m totally regretting not getting one of those obsolete, ineffective, sudden death-inducing novel technology pretend vaccines. I think I’ll take the plunge this year so I can be protected from a virus that I appear to have survived so far with no problems whatsoever. Why not?” Said no sensible, unvaxxed person ever! :-/
Or I’m really itching to get two doses of something said not to be sufficient for anything ever since autumn 2021! Otherwise, it might not be not protected against severe COVID in the proper way!
BTW, your dipshit is really a compliment. This is not an inept person. It’s someone trying to keep the COVID gravy train rolling with sufficiently limited damages that it can actually keep on rolling for a while. This means this guy is either evil (wants to do bad stuff to people because he wants bad stuff to happen to hem) or a psychopath (doesn’t care what happens to other people provided he’s fine).
Oh I think he’s all of the above. Nobody can plead ignorance at this stage, especially nobody with ”Professor” as their title! He’s complete and utter scum of the earth.
Oops, think I just misgendered Prof Lim, who is apparently female. At least the name “Dipshit” is unisex though…
Spot as usual Mogs , it’s beyond reason that the first two jabs are still being offered, bizarre in fact ! Show us the medical reason health experts ? what’s that ! Oh you can’t!!.. Chunts !!!
And sadly I know someone (81) who will willingly line up for extra jabs this year, despite a rapid decline in health (which could be either age or vaccine related, but who’s to say?), and also a poor soul in a care home with dementia who gets jabbed routinely because he hasn’t got the wherewithall to question it. Last time I saw him his decline had been rapid, but again, no questions will be asked when he dies because, well, old sick people die, don’t they?
Yes the only people who get a caveat for my scathing statement above are the people who are too cognitively impaired to make an informed decision on their own behalf, such as people suffering dementia, learning difficulties or people who are profoundly disabled with no way of communicating effectively. Unfortunately these individuals are completely reliant on their caregivers for their health and welfare. It’s all very crap.
That’s an unfortunate side-effect of modern, urban rot: A family is grand parents, parents and children living in a single house. By the time the grand parents die, the children are old enough to become the parents. That’s how stuff worked not that long ago (150 years, roughly).
NB: I’m no better in this respect, as I’m living 434 miles distant from my parents.
Many, many folk don’t have the critical thinking skills or the backbone in combination to withstand the coercion & pressure following on from the military grade psychological terrorism which the governments have willingly waged on their populace.
What is not known by laypersons is that the ability to understand complex language & complex information declines with age in the normal population. Only relatively (last 20 years) recently known within the SLT profession & great resistance from medics etc to acknowledge this & change the style of information dissemination to their elderly patients. Align this with the also relatively unknown fact that the elderly tend to focus on positive things & ignore negative information, it makes a perfect storm for the older generation to believe all the lies which have been spewed out by the propaganda machinery.
Our governments have been waging a war against us in contravention of the Geneva Convention & the international laws of military engagement.
Sounds like the elephant quietly whispered this in the JCVI members’ ears.
According to Wikipedia, in the last two years. Wei Shen Lim received ‘more than £25001 in research funding from Pfizer’. Not saying he’s corrupted, but is he impartial?
There’s better information available here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221121201039/https://www.brit-thoracic.org.uk/about-us/committees-and-advisory-groups/clinical-audit-leads/35589/
The text is partially unreadable, but can be gathered from the page source. As of 2022, Wei Shen Lim is in control of
Unrestricted investigator initiated funding for a multi-centre pneumonia study in which WSL is the Chief Investigator.
or, put into other words, for the time being, he is – for all practical purposes – on the Pfizer payroll, has received an undeclared amount of money significantly larger than £25,001, and is essentially free to spend that as he sees fit. And he’s a public servant responsible for expert advice on vaccination in the UK at the same time(!).
I’m not saying that this is a striking example of corrupt official selling the population of the UK down the river because this really speaks for itself.
“Professor Wei Shen Lim, Chair of COVID-19 vaccination on the JCVI, said: “The COVID-19 vaccination programme continues to reduce severe disease across the population, while helping to protect the NHS.”
Just think how much worse the excess deaths and ambulance waiting times would be without the “vaccinations”…
Despite only recently approving this for 5+, going so far as to book them appointments for these injections, just like that, they’re dropped.
IMHO the whole quackcine programme should be STOPPED for all age groups not just the under 50’s
Regarding Alex Berenson’s Substack.
Put the odds of Covid hospitalisation against the odds of adverse reactions….
Question is why they did not drop these vaccines 2 years ago. Or with the benefit of the Pfizer papers did not ever start with these vaccines in the first place.
The Covid Pandemic Hoax. “A story for the ages”
They are slowly, slowly trying to distance the Government from the policy which has killed thousands, massively injured tens of thousands and had adverse effects for hundreds of thousands.
There will never be an admission that the experimental monkey juice is to blame for these. It will all be blamed on lack of access to healthcare “during the Covid emergency” and the evil people who instigated and carried out the policy will get away without any kind of censure.
The EVIL they carried out is so huge, and so many powerful people as well as ordinary healthcare providers are implicated, that they daren’t do otherwise.
Continuing to promote the snake-oil will make defence against murder more difficult – the link between the ‘vaccines’ and people dropping dead wasn’t at first clear – should these evil people ever be put on trial.