MPs have raised concerns about the fact that the government is funding a disinformation ratings agency called 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.
Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary, is reportedly among a group of around ten MPs who are concerned about the prospect of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) continuing to fund the British-based company after it was accused of warning advertisers away from a mainstream UK news and commentary website.
The fact that details of this funding arrangement are now in the public domain is thanks in part to the Free Speech Union. Last year, we assisted Philip Davies MP (Con: Shipley) to prepare a written parliamentary question asking the government how much funding 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.
Apart from the support of the British taxpayer, the GDI has received funds from the US 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.
Despite the body not having received any FCDO funding since March 2023, senior staff are understood to have held meetings with government officials, who continue to regard it as a credible partner.
Last year, for instance, an independent report for the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, titled Safer technology, safer users: The UK as a world-leader in Safety Tech, 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 has rung alarm bells after the 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.
A government source said that any moves to stifle debate about the hotly contested topic of transgender rights was worrying.
“As the Cass Review has shown, shutting down gender-critical beliefs can have terrible consequences in the real world,” the source said. “In the wake of Cass, we need to do more to ensure public money is not spent on dubious bodies looking to silence those prepared to tell the truth.”
That’s good to hear, obviously. But the fact some government officials continue to regard the GDI as a good actor within the burgeoning ‘Safer Tech’ sector is troubling, given the ease with which the outfit is now equating 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 company 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.
Wait, what?
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.
The fact 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!’, ‘Puberty blockers: just before bed, or when the little darlings get home from school?’, 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 does not 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 last week, said she planned to apply pressure to policymakers.
“Tackling disinformation is important but it must not lead to censorship of legitimate opinions and public debate,” she said. “We will certainly be following up with ministers about the evidence we’ve received as part of our ongoing inquiry into the future of news.”
Not before time, especially given that a fightback has been underway for some time now in the US, spearheaded by Taibbi and his Twitter Files collaborator Michael Shellenberger and helped along by the GOP.
Last year, the Chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, Republican James Comer, raised the alarm, demanding records and a State Department briefing related to the agency-backed Global Engagement Centre and National Endowment for Democracy (NED) granting $665,000 to the GDI.
Speaking to the Washington Examiner, Comer said: “American taxpayer dollars should never be used to suppress our First Amendment rights protected in the U.S. Constitution. The fact that the State Department allowed federal funds to flow to foreign organisations [i.e., the British-based GDI] who seek to blacklist American news organizations goes against our core values.”
Thanks to the subsequent work of Republican Senator Elise Stefanik and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, the GDI ended up losing the NED’s financial support.
Stefanik, an NED board member, was able to persuade her fellow board members to cut the funding on the grounds that it is supposed to promote the promotion of democracy outside the US, 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 proposed as part of the House Armed Services Committee’s 2024 National Defence Authorisation Act was then adopted by the House and now operates to block Pentagon funds from disinformation monitors 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.
This amendment is good news because the rule singles out the GDI, Graphika, NewsGuard.
According to the text of the amendment, advertising and marketing agencies the Department of Defence (DOD) employs to reach new recruits will have to certify they do not use any services from these organisations.
It’s good to see US 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 FCDO to think twice before channelling any more British taxpayers’ money in the GDI’s direction.
