The House of Representatives included a rule in the annual defence bill passed last Thursday banning the Department of Defence from funding organisations that police and rank news sites according to how ‘reliable’ they are. This is particularly good news because the rule singled out the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), Graphika, NewsGuard and other organisations that deliberately try to ‘disrupt’ the funding of news publishing sites on the grounds that they publish ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’, ‘malinformation’ and ‘hate speech’ – deliberately vague terms that are often applied to information and opinions that these organisations disapprove of or believe their funders disapprove of.
“Proud to pass my amendment that prohibits the Department of Defense from contracting with any one of a number of ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ monitors that rate news and information sources,” said Rich McCormick, a Republican Representative from Georgia, who sponsored the amendment. “While these media monitors claim to be nonpartisan, the reality is they are not.”
The recent emergence of ‘media monitors’ like the GDI, Graphika and NewsGuard has opened up a new front in the battle for online free speech. These organisations often have contracts with large, media-buying companies whereby they advise them about which news publishing sites are ‘safe’ for their clients to advertise on and, in that way, ‘disrupt’ the funding of those sites. Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi and his colleagues recently compiled a top-50 style ranking of the “main players” in this nascent industry, and at #37 sits the GDI, which currently receives taxpayers’ money via the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).
What’s particularly striking about the GDI is that unlike, say, the U.K. Government’s secretive Counter-Disinformation Unit, which spent the pandemic clandestinely flagging perfectly lawful social media posts by critics of lockdown to companies such as Facebook and Twitter to encourage swift ‘takedown’, it’s an outfit that is entirely transparent about its censorial ambitions. As Taibbi and co observe, the GDI “announces openly that its strategy is to push major digital marketing clients to redirect their online ad spending”. In other words, the aim is to discredit news organisations GDI doesn’t like, reduce their ad revenue and ultimately shut them down.
Publications on the GDI’s list of the 10 ‘riskiest’ news publishing sites in the U.S. include the American Spectator, Breitbart, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, American Conservative, Real Clear Politics, the New York Post and Reason. All the ‘risky’ sites are right-of-centre with the exception of Reason, one of the few prominent press critics of organised censorship, while the New York Post was of course the only mainstream newspaper in the U.S. to publicise the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Needless to say, the news publishing sites ranked the most reliable by GDI were, with one exception, left-of-centre: NPR, The Associated Press, the New York Times, ProPublica, Insider, USA Today, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, the Wall Street Journal, and the Huffington Post.
Apart from the support of the British taxpayer, the GDI has received funds from the U.S. State Department via the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), as well as George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and a group of wealthy foundations including the left-wing Knight Foundation.
How do organisations like the GDI build their ‘dynamic exclusion list’? As Matt Taibbi and co put it: “The GDI’s credibility/risk/trust scoring is built atop a series of subjective variables, among them the use of ‘targeting language’ that ‘demeans or belittles people or organisations’, or includes ‘hyperbolic’, ‘emotional’ and ‘alarmist’ language.”
Subjective is the key word there. 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 it’s false and have malevolent intentions, which is how it was originally understood. The GDI has broadened its definition to include what it calls “adversarial narratives… which create a risk of harm by undermining trust in science or targeting at-risk individuals or institutions”.
So, by way of an illustration helpfully provided by the GDI, if a conservative publication like Breitbart decides to use the term ‘illegal alien’ in its crime reporting – rather than the term ‘undocumented immigrant’ – the GDI classifies that as disinformation. Does that make Breitbart’s reporting inaccurate? Of course not. As the GDI’s Executive Director, Danny Rogers, cheerfully concedes, “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”. The problem, he says, is that such phrases are integral to an “adversarial narrative” that poses a “risk of harm to vulnerable populations”. By the same token, a factually accurate report drawing attention to an adverse side effect of a COVID-19 vaccine would be classed as disinformation since it would “risk… undermining trust in science”.
However, a fightback is underway in the U.S. spearheaded by Taibbi and his Twitter Files collaborator Michael Shellenberger and helped along by the GOP.
Back in February, thanks to the work of Republican Senator Elise Stefanik, the GDI lost the National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED’s) financial support over its role in trying to demonetise conservative news outlets. The NED’s decision to defund GDI is a significant victory for free speech because the NED is funded by the U.S. State Department. Financial documents show the NED has received over $300 million from the U.S. Government since 2021. Stefanik, an NED board member, was able to persuade her fellow board members to stop funding the GDI on the grounds that the fund is supposed to promote the promotion of democracy outside the U.S., so trying to demonetise domestic news publishers is outside its remit, whether you regard them as choc full of ‘mis-’ and ‘disinformation’ or not.
Building on this success, an amendment adopted as part of the House Armed Services Committee’s 2024 National Defense Authorisation Act has been adopted by the House that will block Pentagon funds from going to the Global Disinformation Index, Graphika, NewsGuard or “any other entity the function of which is to advise the censorship or blacklisting of news sources based on subjective criteria or political biases, under the stated function of ‘fact checking’ or otherwise removing ‘misinformation’” from the internet.
According to the text of the amendment, advertising and marketing agencies the Department of Defense (DOD) employs to reach new recruits will now have to certify they do not use any services from these organisations.
It’s good to see U.S. politicians waking up to the threat to free speech posed by the nascent anti-disinformation industry. The Free Speech Union is working with friends and supporters across both Houses of Parliament to persuade the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to stop its funding of the GDI.
Dr. Frederick Attenborough is the Communications Officer of the Free Speech Union.
Stop Press: Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were in the U.K. last week in an effort to coordinate a global fightback against the censorship-industrial complex. The Daily Sceptic’s Editor-in-Chief Toby Young attended a one-day conference organised by them on Friday and says it was very productive.
Stop Press 2: The House Weaponisation Subcommittee, which is investigating online censorship facilitated by the U.S. federal government, has issued a report saying the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a division of the Department of Homeland Security, has “facilitated the censorship of Americans directly” and through third-party intermediaries during Biden’s administration. Fox News has more.
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The vast majority of sales are corporate, with less than 5% being private sales.
Dealers find themselves encumbered by stock they cannot sell and shenanigans are afoot in terms of releasing their new stock into the market and using Auto trader ghost ads of not-for-sale vehicles at high prices to game the AT algorithm which decides whether the prices of the cars actually on sale are higher/lower than average (Geoff buys cars on YouTube).
They won’t take EV in part exchange either, so many people are beginning to realise they own a lemon.
The mandatory selling ratio of EV vs ICE will drive dealerships to the wall. They’ll need to make a massive and very public fuss or go out of business.
It looks like a case of “prevention is better than cure” re batteries catching fire. The risks may well be related to quality of manufacture, and also to the way they are used. It appears that there are a couple of different chemical structures in use for Lithium ion ones – Nickel/Manganese/Cobalt (NMC), and Iron/Phosphorous (LFP). Some say that LFP is less likely to incinerate than the other – but at the expense of being heavier and with lower capacity.
And not actually being significantly safer either, I’ve seen LiFeP batteries burn in the past.
The battery packs are underneath and therefore vulnerable to damage – bumping up curbs, stones or other debris thrown up by the wheels and also water damage.
The effect may not be realised immediately.
True with full on battery electric ones. My Toyota hybrid’s traction battery is inside, under the back seat beside it’s petrol tank and 12V LA battery.
Battery next to petrol tank sounds interesting! Wonder if car ferries and channel trains have factored in the fire hazards of these bombs on wheels?
If you had criminal intentions, how easy it would be to trigger an explosion and EV fire and cause all sort of damage.
There are no recycling facilities nor end of life facilities for these products. Nor are there enough technicians to fix those that are damaged. I feat that we will see a lot of burnt out fly tipped evs before too long in gateways and hedgerows up and down the country. I hope I am wrong. The environmental damage will be great.
As more EVs are on the road we will see more of this – probably also will increase with the age of the EVs on the road.
They used to make good milk floats.
They did, when it was normal to have milk delivered at home most days, usually in glass bottles that got used again and again. Big lead acid batteries on those; no chance of it incinerating.
We still have milk delivered in glass bottles, though as the houses who take deliveries are far apart, a proper van is needed to get between them in a reasonable time.
Many years ago (maybe mid-80s) a friend crashed his Ford Fiesta into a milk float – he swore it was the float that crashed into him. Fortunately he and milko were unhurt.
The milk float barely moved – his car was in pieces across the road.
To be fair his car was a rust bucket – I did say it was a Fiesta of many years ago, didn’t I?
Milk floats had to be built like a brick outhouse, the batteries are large and very heavy and the milk is also heavy when in bottles and in quantity.
Doesn’t sound like it would float.
Oooo, images of Barbara Flynn have just passed through my mind….
We have our milk, eggs and fruit juice delivered direct from a farm 15 minutes away. They sadly deliver in a diesel van and not milk float these days.
I grew up with one like that. The local farmer had a small herd (only about 12 or 13 cows) and a little dairy at the farm. Untreated whole milk in glass bottles. He had a Morris Minor van, and collected the empties when delivering. Not many small farms like that now, in the dairy trade.
“Thermal events” is one of the best euphemisms ever. “Israeli rockets may or may not have caused 60 thermal events in Beirut last night…”
It’s a BBC type word to avoid saying the real word like “Terrorist”.
Imagine when, note when not if, one blows up on the school run in static traffic. So far they seem to be isolated incidents but look at the picture and tell me nobody gets hurt when it happens outside a school.
Net zero is a religious creed. Those who want to live by it will see a small percentage of vehicle fires (because let’s face it, it’s a tiny percentage.of the total number of vehicles) as a price worth paying for salvation. Especially if the bad luck is befalling someone else. (It’s a narcissistic religion, one that pretends to be about caring for others and but is actually completely self absorbed.)
It is the ‘net’ result of the left’s war on faith…
“Welcome to a future where electric cars become common…”
Daily almost, in Europe, the US reports of huge drop in sales of BEVs, automakers abandoning production plans, shutting down production lines, firing workers, losing £billions, car rental companies dumping BEVs as customers don’t want to hire them – yet commentators make statements like the one above, and Governments carry on as if BEVs will replace ICEVs because they have decreed it.
In what World do these folk live?
In 100 years time I predict that some new technology will have come to the fore and our descendants will not be driving petrol, diesel or lithium battery electric cars. I have no idea what that technology will be but it will not come about by meddling posturing politicians it will come about, as ever, by the inventiveness of mankind and the ability of the rest of mankind to recognise and take up a good idea when they see it.
As it is politicians are so full of net-zero hubris and arrogance that they are petulantly stamping their feet and shrieking at current technology to deliver something which, at present. current technology cannot deliver. It looks destined to by a bumpy ride into a right mess before there is any chance of it getting better.
I am delighted to learn that the common sense of ‘everyman’ and the market has seen through this. How long it will take politicians is another matter.
‘Clown World’
“Electric Vehicle Explosions Rise 46% in a Year”
– but only about 540 of the 921 report Li battery fires seem to be from vehicles, when you sum up the number of fires per vehicle category in the table. So what makes up the difference?
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/10/2875
A bit of insight into how flipping difficult it gets.
Oil is so beautifully simple.
Coincidentally, your house & building insurance goes up if unfortunately you have an EV as the reality is, is that an EV fire can burn your house down. EV’s are the Betamax of the automotive industry.
670 of those fires, over the two years, were most likely indoors as it’s unlikely that you would charge or keep your ebike or escooter outside due to it’s nickability.
How long until home insurance bans these things from coming indoors?
My company building insurance, recently renewed, now no longer accepts any liability for fire caused by lithium battery recharging on the premises. It won’t be long before they start applying this to domestic premises as well, I’m sure.
Do you have the figures for (seemingly spontaneous) fires in ICE cars? If so then a relevant comparison can be made.
Tesco are changing their fleet of over 5,000 delivery vans to full electric. How’s that for a £300m minimum virtue signal? That’s circa 10% of their gross profit. Glad I’m not a shareholder.
It would be nice if you had a balanced view on EV’s.
I have been a huge supporter of the dailysceptic but your utter bias on this has started me to wonder if you are as bad as the people you claim are polluting the public’s minds with utter rubbish.