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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I’ll be happy to contribute £50 to help fund the prosecution
Brilliant.
Those thugs should have been remanded immediately. Isn’t it strange how Two Tier Free Gear Kier can put people away for hurty words in a matter of hours but thugs causing physical hurt and damage to police officers, one a woman, are still roaming the streets?
If ever there was an example of the depraved criminality of our political establishment this case exemplifies it in a nutshell.
Well didn’t one of them break the policewoman’s nose? Where’s Yvette Cooper with her ”extreme misogyny” claptrap when you need her? Just shows what we already know, really. All just p*ss and wind, not applicable to a certain protected sector of society, but had that been a white bloke he’d have been banged up ages ago, no doubt labelled ”far right” an’ all. They’re still terrified of being accused of ”Islamophobia” aren’t they?
Mogs, I remain convinced that this blatant abuse of our judicial system is deliberate and is being done in order to increase racial divisions and to stir the pot so to speak. Evil in other words.
No end of evidence which supports that theory, that’s for sure. The courts seem to have all had a memo to keep perverts out of jail, especially if they’re Muslims;
”White man rips the windscreen wipers off a police van = 30 months in jail.
Vs.
Muslim man grooms/sexually assaults vulnerable teen = no jail because the prisons are full.
You couldn’t make it up.”
Source;
”A Blackburn man has been spared prison for sexually assaulting a teenager due to the “enormous pressure on the prison system”.
Imran Zaman, of Preston New Road, Blackburn, was handed a sentence of 20 months, suspended for two years, for sexually assaulting the teenager while he slept.
The court heard how Zaman, 42, had befriended the victim when he was a child, and regularly invited him to his home to drink and smoke cannabis.
Preston Crown Court heard how Zaman visited the victim, who was aged 19 at the time, on August 13, 2022, taking a bag of ketamine with him.”
https://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/news/24593197.imran-zaman-avoids-prison-due-overcrowded-prison/
”Jake Joseph, 25 years, of St Thomas More Drive, Birkdale, threw items at police and jumped onto a police van. He was jailed for two years, 10 months.
• Kevin Underwood, 61 years, of Poulton Road, Southport confronted officers and threw items at them. He was jailed for two years, two months.
• Nicholas Mooney, 29 years, of Jackson Close, Haskayne confronted officers, threw missiles at them and jumped on a police van before striking it several times. He was jailed for two-and-a-half years.”
https://www.merseyside.police.uk/news/merseyside/news/2024/october/three-jailed-for-violent-disorder-in-southport/
Whilst it’s not a popular thing to say this is probably being held back to prevent action against the officer…
2 kicks to the head whilst prone on the floor is about as textbook GBH with intent as you’ll get…
They’ll be worried about another mass surrender of armed officers if (when?) he’s charged…
The 2 were definitely wrong but that doesn’t excuse the officer losing control
Yes, I agree. I saw the full footage and even with the prior assaults taken into consideration the guy was prone on the floor and restrained, so the officer’s behaviour can’t really be justified, to be honest. I think how the officer would behave out of uniform as a civilian, had a similar incident occurred out on the street, and how he was expected to behave ( and presumably what they train for and should anticipate ) whilst on duty are two different things. He just lost his rag and used disproportionate force, which is really unfortunate because now the perp becomes the victim, so that serves them very well.
From what we see on the full video I think the use of Tasers and feet to quell the offenders was entirely reasonable. These officers were armed and it ought to b e within their authority to shoot if their dutues are threatened or if violence is used against them.
In what other country, where police are universally armed, would an officer not have used his weapon. Death for the criminals would have been a lot worse than a cyst on the brain.
What “ought” to be isn’t relevant, what the law says is…
Personally I disagree with you as once the guy was on the floor having been tazed the threat was past. Everything up to that point was fair enough but once he was on the floor it’s over…
What happens in other countries isn’t relevant and personally I’m glad to not live in a country where police can shoot people with impunity…
As demonstrated in the last few years, Cousins, Carrick, many others, 2 tier policing of the riots and the current case in the old bailey the moment shows the police cannot be trusted these days and it’s important they’re held to account as the public would be…
Edited as pressed post by mistake
Well they’ve got tasers, truncheons and handcuffs, some even have pepper spray, plus they’d have physical training in how to defend themselves and restrain an attacker, so I’m not sure what else is necessary really because they’ve got everything at their disposal so as to always be in control. The attacker only had his fists.
I’m not entirely sure of your point but again to be unpopular to this has illustrated the restrictions of females on front line policing duties…
The male officer ended up 2 to 1 down as both females were out of the fight and then there’s the inbuilt male behaviour to protect females so when he got the opportunity he dished out some retribution…
1 kick to the head would be bad but possibly defendable due to the circumstances/adrenaline, 2 is just revenge
My point was that the police have enough devices and training in using them, including the proper technique of restraining somebody who’s resisting arrest/threatening them, therefore there was no justification for the kicking in the head once the perp was on the deck, immobilized. Female or not, if they’ve had adequate training in how to handle such a situation, including how to use said devices, then it boils down to how competent and quick-thinking they are when push comes to shove. A female officer is just as capable at tasering somebody as her male counterpart. Failing that, a kick in the nuts would also be a decent immobilizer, and do less lasting damage than giving somebody concussion or a brain bleed.
I’m not sure why you feel the need to turn this into a ‘males are better than females’ issue. An officer is either competent or they’re not, much like they’re either in control of their emotions or not. Perhaps hot-headed male officers who can’t control their anger shouldn’t be ”on front line policing duties” either. And we’ve seen plenty evidence of this ( always male officers getting heavy-handed ) with the peaceful protesters, such as at Whitehall. It’s an individual temperament/ability thing, not a gender thing.
Right I understand your point about the equipment negating the kicking now and I would agree.
I’m not trying to make this male Vs female. The reality is the average male is stronger than the average female. Training will only go so far against physical superiority. A “kick in the nuts” only immobilises if you can get it in…
The female being as capable of tazering someone is irrelevant when they’d been incapacitated and only the male is left standing…
I completely agree that hot head male officers (or female ones, remember the “lesbian nana” officer) or any officer who abuses their position shouldn’t be in place and that’s why I do hope this officer is charged as that would be the standard for any member of the public
Have you ever tried to restrain someone who doesn’t want to be restrained and who is displaying extreme violence? I suspect not. I have and it’s nigh on impossible, no matter how well you’ve been trained. Someone who is expert in martial arts might cope – *might* cope – but your average copper would massively struggle. I always struggled, trying to hold on to the sheetbag with one hand whilst trying to call for help with the other, whilst bearing in mind that I have to follow ‘the rules’ but he doesn’t, whilst bearing in mind that some twat is always filming you wanting you to make a mistake so they can try to ‘have your job’.
I won’t justify the kick to the head but I will 100% understand it. The sheethead on the floor had just beaten up the male officer’s colleagues and was trying to do the same to him. His adrenaline would have been surging in his blood, plus he was almost certainly sheeting himself about losing his firearm whilst being terrified about unholstering it.
It always makes me laugh when armchair pundits say ‘the copper shouldn’t have done that’ when they themselves will never face the same situation.
Here’s my take on it; the sheethead on the floor deserved his kicks. I’d give the copper words of advice and then give him a commendation.
I agree with you but as to why the civilians involved have not been charged is beyond me.
Unless it’s something to do with political orders.
Surely not.
Once they’re charged the focus will shift to the officer’s conduct. I could fully believe they were hoping this would go away and they could quietly drop the whole matter. That’s looking very unlikely to happen…
Following the charging of officer Blake following the shooting in London there was a huge number of armed officers surrender their tickets to carry firearms. I suspect they’re worried about the same happening here.
Whilst they sometimes only have moments to react they need to be held accountable for those mistakes when they happen…
To expand my feelings I’m a truck driver. I (and no other truck driver) goes to work to kill anyone but a moment of distraction/lack of attention or just a simple misjudgement and I could easily kill someone. Should I do so I’ll face the full force of the law for my mistake. I don’t see it as unreasonable to expect the police to be held to the same standard
I agree.
There can be no excuse for not shooting the f***er there and then.
In which case the violent thugs should be prosecuted and the police officer should be dealt with via the police complaints system.
You don’t “let off” the violent thugs in order to shield a police officer who may/may not have behaved inappropriately.
I agree they shouldn’t be let off however that’s often how these things work…
I’m not familiar with the police complaints system but I’d suggest it’s likely beyond that.
There’s no question the officers actions were inappropriate.
For all the questions about why the 2 haven’t been charged yet there’s the same question about the officer.
There’s clear CCTV of him committing GBH with intent…
I’d suggest a member of the public kicking someone twice in the head outside a pub on Saturday night would already have been charged by now
Seeing comments like this make me wonder why the hell would anyone be a copper. The public don’t want human beings as coppers, they want robots; automatons who just follow their programming to the exact line of code. No intuition, no humanity, no warmth, no thinking, just the cold, hard law.
The public gets the police service it deserves. The public deserves an emasculated, fearful and weak police service.
As I said above the public is held accountable for their mistakes why not the police?
They’re supposed to police “without fear or favour” how many examples would you like me to give where they clearly don’t?
What you describe would be nice and an improvement on the current situation…
No 2 tier policing depending on race or skin colour, no covering up misconduct for your mates…
There’s a case in the old bailey at the minute and based on what’s already in the public domain it was clearly excessive force, I’ll grant it may not be murder but he definitely did wrong and he needs to be accountable for that.
20 years ago I had huge respect for the police, it’s their actions (and more importantly inactions) that are the reason I and many others no longer respect them.
I’m glad you’ve returned your verdict before the whole of the evidence has been heard, never mind made public.
I’m glad you’re not disputing my point that the police can’t be trusted and don’t police without fear or favour these days…
In summary we already know from pre reports and coverage of the trial so far the car was stationary and his hands were visible, so no immediate threat to life.
7 firearms officers on scene but only 1 fires.
He either needs to explain what he saw or heard that the others didn’t which made him believe there was an immediate threat to life else the force is excessive.
He hasn’t else we wouldn’t have trial, let alone a murder one.
As I said it may not be murder, that’s what the trials for.
The only other option is he’s got it right and the other 6 needs removing from firearms duty for not recognising the threat he’d identified and the CPS is wasting a huge amount of time and money because of the threat he’s already told them about (that noone else saw or heard) meant he was right all along
The mother of the men also assaulted at least one officer.
What a waste of time and money. 2TK will ensure that one of the judges who imprisoned old ladies and young boys for their social media comments, presides the case. The verdict: a 2-year custodian sentence for the Reform MP for Islamophobia and exile to the Falkland Islands (if still British) for Farage responsible for leading a hard-right thugs Party.
If he’s lucky
Our anti-white government will take over the prosecution and then cancel it. The anarcho-tyranny state must let the thugs go free. Firstly, they come from the Left’s Favourite Religion, and second the thugs are a danger to the English people, and therefore they must be allowed to roam free.
Ample opportunity for that when you have a regular and ceaseless supply of incomers. Britain really has become the number one destination on many ‘asylum seekers’ bucket list, it would seem. What on earth’s wrong with France anyway? I thought ”beggars can’t be choosers”. I have a sneaky suspicion the 745,000 figure quoted is way more in reality;
”Britain has the most illegal migrants than any other country in Europe, a new study has revealed.
Research led by Oxford University experts found that there are up to 745,000 illegal migrants in the UK – accounting for one in 100 of the population.
It comes after 973 migrants in 17 small boats crossed the English Channel on Saturday – the highest number to arrive on a single day in 2024.
A total of 26,612 migrants have crossed the Channel so far this year, which is up five per cent on 2023 at the same stage.
However, the total is behind the record of 33,611 at this point in 2022.
Sir Keir Starmer has been slammed by senior Tories after the Labour party scrapped the Rwanda scheme.
The Government is facing calls to crack down on people-smuggling gangs responsible for the crisis.”
https://www.gbnews.com/news/migrant-crisis-illegal-immigrants-britain-record
Bring it on!
I don’t know anything about this particular incident but the police are a bit soft in this country. In other countries people would get shot for mouthing off to a policeman and you see it all the time here, I’m not blaming the police or the miscreants but this isn’t a healthy society. Just take a walk down the street or go to a supermarket. I am not talking about advanced stuff I mean basic spatial awareness. I don’t know what they’re on but it doesn’t look too pleasant.
I’ll cough up to prosecute these violent thugs …. who appear to be protected by their skin colour and religion.
Good.