The Global Disinformation Index Is Toxic for Our Information Eco-System
In January of this year, Unherd, a conservative British news and opinion platform, received confirmation from the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) that Unherd’s dramatically low ad revenue (by their own estimation, between 2% and 6% of what they would normally be expected to receive) was due to the GDI rating them as an “unsafe” website for advertisers. Why would a popular conservative platform like Unherd be rated “unsafe” on a disinformation index? According to GDI’s email to Unherd,
Our team re-reviewed the domain, the rating will not change as it continues to have anti-LGBTQI+ narratives… The site authors have been called out for being anti-trans. Kathleen Stock is acknowledged as a ‘prominent gender-critical’ feminist.
So it would appear that a conservative media organisation can see its ad revenues plummet because a shadowy “disinformation index” has decided that defending the biological basis of sex makes a website “unsafe” for advertisers.
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The fact that “disinformation” includes a highly mainstream opinion that is held by a large section of the population and is part of an ongoing political debate should be enough to make us wonder whether those parading as the guardians of “information integrity” might simply be people who wish to censor commentators on the right of the political spectrum.
And a quick review of their website ratings, shared by Unherd, confirms that effectively, for the Global Disinformation Index, “disinformation” tends to coincide quite neatly with right-wing news sources such as the New York Post and The Daily Wire, while “safe” sites tend to lean toward the left, such as NPR and The New York Times. How convenient.
The Global Disinformation Index was founded in the UK in 2018, with the objective of de-funding “disinformation” publications. The index has received funding from George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the UK government (via the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office), the European Union, the German Foreign Office and the US State Department.
In spite of its avowed commitment to “transparency,” the way this index operates is the very opposite of transparent. If you get a bad “safety” rating on the index, you see your advertising revenue decimated. But this process is so automated that you may not even notice what is going on. If you investigate and get to the bottom of the matter, as Unherd did, you may ask GDI to reconsider their choice to downgrade your website. But you are wholly at their mercy. They unilaterally decide the fate of your business, based on whether they think your opinions are consistent with “brand safety.”
Whereas you might think disinformation is patently false information that is intentionally disseminated, Ms Melford, one of the co-founders of the Global Disinformation Index, argued in a 2021 Zoom discussion at the London School of Economics for a much more political and open-ended definition of disinformation.
“Our definition of disinformation at GDI,” she says, includes “intentionally misleading narrative(s)” that are “adversarial against a group,” like women or racial minorities, or “adversarial against institutions, like the media, or the police, or the judiciary.” Thirdly, disinformation, on GDI’s definition, includes narratives that are “adversarial against science itself.”
With such a vague definition in hand, you could downgrade just about any website that offers a critical take on science, media, or public institutions. To start with, politics is inherently “adversarial.” Political debate and democracy go hand in hand, and political debate involves critique of institutions and the development of narratives and counter-narratives. Anyone who reflects for a moment on the nature of science - which necessarily involves arguments and counter-arguments - can see that making an argument against a popular scientific position, while “adversarial” by definition, is not necessarily adversarial “against science itself.” Yet if you wanted to blacklist a scientific dissenter, you could easily misrepresent their position as “adversarial against science itself.”
By the same token, it is obvious that what counts as a “misleading” narrative is in the eye of the beholder, since what one considers “misleading” obviously depends on one’s political and scientific opinions and prejudices. In a democratic society, what counts as a “misleading” opinion can only be decided by open debate. It most definitely should not be decided in the dark by the say-so of a handful of anonymous individuals operating under the auspices of a private organisation funded by George Soros, the US State Department, and a handful of sundry governments and private “philanthropic” associations.
Otherwise, we are treating the opinions of a private organisation (in this case, the Global Disinformation Index) as automatically superior to those of the organisations they are de-funding. But there is absolutely nothing about Clare Melford and her Global Disinformation Index that sets them apart from the people at Unherd, the New York Post, Reason Magazine, or the Daily Wire as an intrinsically superior source of information and insight on controversial political and scientific topics like vaccination, community masking, climate change, and the relation between biology and gender.
It is time to expose and discredit the Global Disinformation Index so that it can no longer de-fund media organisations just because they lean toward the right of the political spectrum. Ironically, the GDI itself poses a far greater threat to the integrity of our information eco-system than any of the media organisations it is trying to discredit and de-fund.
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Below, some recent posts from The Freedom Blog:
All of this censorship is a preclude to China’s now social credit system. This entity ‘s ammunition is solely based on the illusion that this credit/discredit system is to ensure fairness , proper discord, unification and justice. Yet It’s another way to control the masses , to step in line and to continue to dumb us down. The weather app on my phone will suggest when I need to wear a hat. How to dress for the weather and the best time to go out for a walk. If someone tells me not to read a particular book, that’s when I’m going to read it.
God help us…