The government has stopped channelling taxpayers’ money to a UK-based disinformation ratings agency now facing growing scrutiny over its blacklisting of mainstream UK news websites that publish conservative and gender critical content, according to the foreign secretary, Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton (Order Order).
The business secretary, Kemi Badenoch, is reportedly among a group of at least 10 MPs who are concerned that the government has been funding the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which compiles a “dynamic exclusion list” – or ‘blocklist’ – of publications that publish perfectly lawful conservative and/or gender critical content that it deems ‘harmful’, and then gives that list to advertisers with the aim of persuading them not to advertise on those sites.
Last year, the Free Speech Union assisted Philip Davies MP (Con: Shipley) to prepare a written parliamentary question asking the government how much funding the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) had given the GDI over the previous three years. In reply, the then Under Secretary of State at FCDO, Leo Docherty, revealed that between 2019 and 2022, approximately £2.6 million of taxpayers’ money had been funnelled from the FCDO to the GDI.
In addition to funding the GDI, an independent report commissioned by the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport last year, titled Safer technology, safer users: The UK as a world-leader in Safety Tech, even cited the GDI’s work in “identifying misleading and disinformation narratives” approvingly, while also linking to a GDI report on its “ad-tech” solution to “cutting the funding of disinformation”.
This benign approach to the GDI’s operations rang alarm bells among MPs earlier this year, when it was reported that mainstream online news site UnHerd, which describes its mission as “testing and retesting assumptions without fear or favour”, was added to the company’s dynamic exclusion list for promoting “disinformation”.
The “disinformation” in question turned out to be articles by gender critical – or, as the GDI puts it, “anti trans” – columnists, including lifelong campaigner against violence against women Julie Bindel, transsexual writer and campaigner Debbie Hayton and the academic philosopher Kathleen Stock, who was recently commended at the UK Press Awards.
However, the foreign secretary has now responded to a letter from Ms Badenoch in which she highlighted “concerning reports” about the nature of GDI’s work, and confirmed that FCDO has not funded the body since March 2023 “and there are no current plans to do so”. According to the Times, he underlined the pledge in ink and added, “Thanks for pointing this out” in a handwritten note.
While the government’s decision to stop funding the GDI is a step in the right direction, senior staff at the GDI are understood to have recently held meetings with civil servants at the FCDO, who continue to regard it as a good actor within the burgeoning ‘Safer Tech’ sector. This raises the risk that under a Labour government more suited to the tastes of some in Whitehall, funding will quickly be restarted.
That’s particularly troubling given the ease with which the GDI now appears to equate gender critical belief with ‘disinformation’.
In a message from the GDI to advertising agency Teads that was subsequently shared with Unherd’s Chief Executive and Editor-in-Chief, Freddie Sayers, the body cites Kathleen Stock’s opposition to “transgender self-identification in regards to proposed reforms in the 2004 UK Gender Recognition Act” as a particularly egregious example of an “anti-trans narrative” carried by the publication.
This despite the fact that, as per the ruling in Forstater v Centre for Global Development Europe, the belief that sex is biological and immutable is now a “protected philosophical belief” under the Equality Act 2010 (EqA). It’s certainly true that the ways in which such beliefs manifest themselves in speech and expression might not be protected. But gender critical beliefs expressed within the context of an ongoing public debate about a particular piece of UK legislation would appear prima facie to be protected philosophical beliefs” under the EqA.
That the GDI doesn’t (want to) see it that way will almost certainly be to the detriment of gender critical writers looking to place their work in an increasingly ad revenue dependent online news industry.
Faced with the reality that this category of story poses a risk to their bottom line, hard-nosed editors who quail at the thought of attempting to persuade the Kathleen Stocks and Julie Bindels of this world to redirect their attentions towards topics that, presumably, the GDI feels are more befitting of the well-behaved modern woman – ‘Home baking in the age of Net Zero!’, ‘How I learned to stop worrying and love the Male Gaze!’, etc – may decide instead to take the course involving the least risk: “If in doubt, cut it out.”
In this way, ‘disinformation trackers’ like the GDI – as well as Graphika and NewsGuard – have opened up a new front in the battle for online free speech. 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.
Brands looking to expand their digital footprint by promoting products online through multiple websites and platforms are increasingly turning to such organisations for information on how to manage reputational risk, which, in turn, has granted them considerable power to infringe upon the free speech rights of conservative journalists – and, as we’re now starting to see, gender critical writers and campaigners too.
More technically, these organisations have contracts with large media-buying companies, advising them about which news publishing sites are ‘safe’ for their clients to advertise on and, in that way, ‘disrupt’ the funding of those sites they deem ‘unsafe’.
Although the GDI doesn’t publicise its blocklist, a member of GDI’s ‘advisory panel’, speaking on condition of anonymity to the Washington Examiner, said that any website on its “riskiest” list would “probably” be on the blocklist too.
Publications on the GDI’s list of the 10 “riskiest” news publishing sites in the US 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 the only mainstream newspaper in the U.S. to publicise the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 US 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.
What’s particularly striking about the GDI is that unlike, say, the UK 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. 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.
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 ‘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”.
It’s this same rationale that can be seen at work in the letter the GDI sent UnHerd at the start of January, explaining its decision to place the publication on its dynamic exclusion list. “Our team re-reviewed the domain, the rating will not change as it continues to have anti-LGBTQI+ narratives. Kathleen Stock is acknowledged as a ‘prominent gender-critical feminist’.”
In other words, a news website that publishes perfectly lawful contributions to an ongoing public debate on a matter of great social and political import has been demonetised not because those contributions are ‘inaccurate’, but because they may ‘hurt the feelings’ of some of the parties to that debate.
Is this tantamount to censorship?
Not according to GDI’s co-founder, Clare Melford. “Content producers do not have an inalienable right to ad revenue,” she wrote in a blog post last year, adding: “Freedom of speech does not entitle the speaker to profit from that speech.”
Following GDI’s verdict, Unherd has lost between 2% and 6% of the ad revenue normally expected for an audience of its size.
Ms Melford’s biography appears on the World Economic Forum’s website, and contains the boast that prior to establishing the GDI, she “led the transition of the European Council on Foreign Relations from being part of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation to independent status”.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston, who is chairing an inquiry into the future of news at which UnHerd raised concerns, has also now applied pressure to policymakers. In a letter earlier this week to Nusrat Ghani, the Europe Minister, she asked for clarification about the role brand safety organisations like the GID play in the government’s work to tackle mis/disinformation, and for any government assessments of the GDI’s funded work to be shared with the inquiry.
It’s good to see 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 highlight the risks posed to online free speech by some of the GDI’s work.
