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.
