Confirmed: "Disinformation" Groups Are Creating Lists of "Reprehensible" Sites Which Advertisers Then Use to Blacklist Conservative Sites, Starving Them of Revenue
And the Government Is Funding This

A Basket of Deplorable Websites.

Gabe Kaminsky of the Washington Examiner:

EXCLUSIVE -- Well-funded "disinformation" tracking groups are part of a stealth operation blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news companies large sums in advertising dollars, a Washington Examiner investigation found.

Major ad companies are increasingly seeking guidance from purportedly "nonpartisan" groups claiming to be detecting and fighting online "disinformation." These same "disinformation" monitors are compiling secret website blacklists and feeding them to ad companies, with the aim of defunding and shutting down disfavored speech, according to sources familiar with the situation, public memos, and emails obtained by the Washington Examiner.

Brands, which have been seeking to promote products online through multiple websites to expand their digital footprint, are turning to corporate digital ad companies keyed into global markets. In turn, some of these companies are contracting "disinformation" trackers to obtain private information about which websites they should purportedly "defund."

The Global Disinformation Index, a British group with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups sharing similar board members, is one entity shaping the ad world behind the scenes. GDI's CEO is Clare Melford, former senior vice president for MTV Networks, and its executive director is Daniel Rogers, a tech advisory board member for Human Rights First, a left-leaning nonprofit group that says disinformation fuels "violent extremism and public health crises."

"It's devastating," Mike Benz, the State Department's ex-deputy assistant for internal communications and information policy, told the Washington Examiner. "The implementation of ad 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."

GDI's mission is to "remove the financial incentive" to create "disinformation," and its "core output" is a secretive "dynamic exclusion list" that rates news outlets based on their alleged disinformation "risk" factor, according to its website. There are at least 2,000 websites on this exclusion list, which has "had a significant impact on the advertising revenue that has gone to those sites," Melford said on a March 2022 podcast episode hosted by the Safety Tech Innovation Network, a British government-backed group.

Sounds like Hamilton68 all over again.

"Trust us! We have an algorithm!"

Major online advertisers "subscribe" to these "services," who provide them with a pseudoplausible justification for engaging in leftwing censorship.

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One influential ad company that has subscribed to GDI's exclusion list to defund outlets purportedly spreading disinformation is Xandr, which Microsoft bought from AT&T in 2021 for $1 billion, according to emails leaked to the Washington Examiner.

Xandr informed companies in September 2022 that it would begin adopting GDI's exclusion list to punish content that is "morally reprehensible or patently offensive," lacking "redeeming social value," or "could include false or misleading information," emails show.

"To enforce this change, Xandr is partnering with the Global Disinformation Index ('GDI') and will be adopting their exclusion list," Xandr wrote to other companies, linking to an appeal "webform" for publishers to complete if they disagree with their "risk" rating.

Guess which political direction all the "reprehensible" sites lean?

But GDI, which did not reply to several requests for its exclusion list, discloses in reports which outlets it identifies as the "riskiest" and "worst" offenders for peddling disinformation. These 10, which all skew to the right, are the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post.

Even opinions can be disinformation -- if those opinions run counter to the left's preferred narrative, like "Transgenderism is awesome for children and inventing and enforcing fake pronouns is oh-so-much-fun!"

GDI's "disinformation" tracking efforts, however, have even resulted in opinions being flagged. The organization alleged in an October 2022 memo that a Washington Examiner commentary article titled "The Left's gender-bending obsession is tiresome and absurd" was "anti-LGBTQ+" disinformation.

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Topics that have recently spawned "disinformation" allegedly relate to COVID-19, anti-vaccine content, mask protests, abortion, and alleged voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election, Melford said. She added that "disinformation narratives" have also taken hold around the idea "that there's a corrupt elite working only for themselves, not serving the will of the common man, and that only a strong man can get rid of the corrupt elite."

Claims about the 2016 election being "stolen by Russia" are never "disinformation," notice.

And also note that the entire idea that there's a Deep State, or a "corrupt elite working only for themselves," is now "disinformation." How convenient for the corrupt elite working only for themselves!

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The "whole point" of the "disinformation" tracking industry is clearly to destroy "the reach, scalability, market, and even credibility" of conservative news outlets, added Benz, now executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online, a censorship watchdog.

Indeed.

On the flip side, all of the websites that GDI ranks as the "least risky" lean left in their news coverage -- minus the Wall Street Journal. These include 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.

The outlets purportedly show "minimal bias" and a lack of "sensational language" and have "excelled in disclosing and following their operational policies and practices," said the report. Still, many of these "least" risky outlets, such as Buzzfeed, promoted the Steele dossier, a discredited piece of opposition research that Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign fed to the FBI to link Donald Trump to Russia.

Others, such as HuffPost, have published numerous stories boosting the falsehood that a New York Post story on Hunter Biden's infamous abandoned laptop was "Russian disinformation."

The HuffPost also used to call Trump by a formulaic string of invective -- "racist, sexist, tax-cheating..." etc. -- in every single mention of him. Every. Single. Mention. It was an editorial diktat

But note that HuffPost is said to not traffic in "sensational language"!

It gets worse: The government is using your tax dollars to create an official government-compiled list of Reprehensible Media Which Must be Deplatformed.

This is the second part of Gabe Kaminisky's series on the New Blacklist.

The Department of State has funded a deep-pocketed "disinformation" tracking group that is secretly blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news organizations vital advertising dollars, the Washington Examiner can confirm.

The money is going to the "Global Disinformation Index" previously discussed.

"Any outfit like that engaged in censorship shouldn't have any contact with the government because they're tainted by association with a group that is doing something fundamentally against American values," Jeffrey Clark, ex-acting head of the Justice Department's Civil Division, told the Washington Examiner. "The government or any private entity shouldn't be involved with this entity that's engaged in conduct that is either legally questionable or at least morally questionable."

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The first State Department-backed group that has supported GDI is the National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit group that receives nearly all of its funding from annual congressional appropriations.

According to financial statements, the NED received over $300 million from the State Department in 2021. Critics have argued that the endowment, which Congress authorized in 1983, is essentially a government grantmaking body despite its legal status as a private entity.

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The federal government could run into legal trouble depending on the extent to which it's paying or directing GDI to "censor information, pressure publications to censor, or pressure advertisers not to publish, in a way that harms U.S. citizens or companies," Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, told the Washington Examiner.

But GDI's ties to the government extend far beyond the NED.

GDI has also disclosed taking money from Disinfo Cloud, an unclassified and defunct platform through the State Department's Global Engagement Center. Disinfo Cloud was used between 2018 and 2021 by Congress and over a dozen federal agencies, including the Departments of Defense, Energy, Treasury, and the FBI , according to the State Department.

And the Government Is Funding This&bodytext=A Basket of Deplorable Websites. Gabe Kaminsky of the Washington Examiner: EXCLUSIVE -- Well-funded "disinformation" tracking groups are part of a stealth operation blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news companies large sums in advertising dollars,...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace at 02:30 PM

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