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Rich McCormick, a Republican Representative from Georgia, who sponsored the amendment, said:
"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. 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 [news site] 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.
About the Author:
Dr. Frederick Attenborough is the Communications Officer of the Free Speech Union.
Comment: See also: Time to get rid of federal 'disinformation' bureaus