Government-sponsored agency the Global Disinformation Index is censoring journalism by causing publications to be starved of advertising if they publish anything deemed “harmful”, such as gender critical content. UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers has written about the problem and his own experience of it. Here’s an excerpt.
“Our team re-reviewed the domain, the rating will not change as it continues to have anti-LGBTQI+ narratives… The site authors have been called out for being anti-trans. Kathleen Stock is acknowledged as a ‘prominent gender-critical’ feminist.”
This was part of an email sent to UnHerd at the start of January from an organisation called the Global Disinformation Index. It was its justification, handed down after a series of requests, for placing UnHerd on a so-called “dynamic exclusion list” of publications that supposedly promote “disinformation” and should therefore be boycotted by all advertisers.
It provided examples of the offending content: Kathleen Stock, whose columns are up for a National Press Award this week, Julie Bindel, a lifelong campaigner against violence against women, and Debbie Hayton, who is transgender. Apparently the GDI equates “gender-critical” beliefs, or maintaining that biological sex differences exist, with “disinformation” — despite the fact that those beliefs are specifically protected in British law and held by the majority of the population.
The verdicts of “ratings agencies” such as the GDI, within the complex machinery that serves online ads, are a little-understood mechanism for controlling the media conversation. In UnHerd’s case, the GDI verdict means that we only received between 2% and 6% of the ad revenue normally expected for an audience of our size. Meanwhile, neatly demonstrating the arbitrariness and subjectivity of these judgements, NewsGuard, a rival ratings agency, gives UnHerd a 92.5% trust rating, just ahead of the New York Times at 87.5%.
So, what are these ‘ratings agencies’ that could be the difference between life and death for a media company? How does their influence work? And who funds them? The answers are concerning and raise serious questions about the freedom of the press and the viability of a functioning democracy in the internet age. …
These companies act as invisible gatekeepers within the vast machinery of online advertising.
How this works is relatively straightforward: in UnHerd’s case, we contract with an advertising agency, which relies on a popular tech platform called Grapeshot, founded in the U.K. and since acquired by Larry Ellison’s Oracle, to automatically select appropriate websites for particular campaigns. Grapeshot in turn automatically uses the Global Disinformation Index to provide a feed of data about “brand safety” — and if GDI gives a website a poor score, very few ads will be served. …
The Global Disinformation Index was founded in the U.K. in 2018, with the stated objective of disrupting the business model of online disinformation by starving offending publications of funding. The GDI receives money from the U.K. Government (via the FCDO), the European Union, the German Foreign Office, George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and a body called Disinfo Cloud, which was created and funded by the U.S. State Department.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, its two founders emerged from the upper echelons of ‘respectable’ society. First, there is Clare Melford, whose biography published by the World Economic Forum states that she had previously “led the transition of the European Council on Foreign Relations from being part of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation to independent status”. She set up the GDI with Daniel Rogers, who worked “in the U.S. intelligence community”, before founding a company called “Terbium Labs” that used AI and machine learning to scour the internet for illicit use of sensitive data and then sold it handsomely to Deloitte. Together, they have spearheaded a carefully intellectualised definitional creep as to what counts as “disinformation”. Back when it was first set up in 2018, they defined the term on their website as “deliberately false content, designed to deceive”. Within these strict parameters, you can see how it might have appeared useful to have dedicated fact-checkers identifying the most egregious offenders and calling them out. But they have since broadened the definition to encompass anything that deploys an “adversarial narrative” — stories that may be factually true, but pit people against each other by attacking an individual, an institution or ‘the science’.
GDI founder Clare Melford explained in an interview at the LSE in 2021 how this expanded definition was more “useful”, as it allowed them to go beyond fact-checking to targeting anything on the internet that they deem “harmful” or “divisive”.
Worth reading in full.
Watch Freddie talking about his experience with the GDI here.
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