Sources familiar with the matter say these purported "nonpartisan" groups that claim to fight misinformation are compiling secret website blacklists and feeding them to advertising companies with the goal of defunding and eliminating all unapproved speech online.
By blacklisting conservative news websites via the advertising route, these disinformation groups are effectively cutting off their flow of revenue, potentially putting them out of business.
One company that promotes products online through various websites is known as Brands. This one is said to be contracting "disinformation" trackers to obtain private information about which sites need to be "defunded" through removal of digital ad support.
Then we have the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British group tied to two affiliated nonprofit groups based out of the United States. GDI's CEO is Clare Melford, a former senior vice president for MTV networks. Its executive director is Daniel Rogers, a tech advisory board member for Human Rights First, a left-wing group that says disinformation fuels "violent extremism and public health crises."
"It's devastating," says Mike Benz, the State Department's ex-deputy assistant for internal communications and information policy, to the Washington Examiner, which is running a multi-part exposé about the matter.
"The implementation of ad revenue crushing sentinels like Newsguard, Global Disinformation Index, and the like has completely crippled the potential of alternative news sources to compete on an even economic playing field with approved media outlets like CNN and The New York Times."
(Related: Fake president Joe Biden also created his own "Disinformation Governance Board," but it was declared unconstitutional by the FCC.)
By depriving conservative news websites of advertising revenue, GDI is driving many of them out of business
The stated purpose behind GDI's mission is to "remove the financial incentive" to promote and spread what it deems as "disinformation." The group's "core output" is a secretive "dynamic exclusion list" that rates news sites based on their disinformation "risk" factor, as determined by GDI.
As of this writing, there are at least 2,000 websites on this secret blacklist, and GDI's exclusion protocols have "had a significant impact on the advertising revenue that has gone to those sites," Melford revealed in a March 2022 podcast episode hosted by the Safety Tech Innovation Network, a British government-backed entity.
One of the advertising companies that subscribes to GDI's exclusion list is called Xandr, which was purchased by Microsoft from AT&T back in 2021 for $1 billion. Last September, Xandr announced that it was beginning to use GDI's exclusion list to punish content that is "morally reprehensible or patently offensive," lacking in "redeeming social value," or "could include false or misleading information."
"To enforce this change, Xandr is partnering with the Global Disinformation Index ('GDI') and will be adopting their exclusion list," the company wrote in a memo to several other companies, urging them to have their clients use its appeal "webform" in the event they disagree with their "risk" rating.
GDI's "advisory panel" is responsible for overseeing the exclusion panel. The panel is reportedly comprised of journalists, professors, and data scientists, including Ben Nimmo, global lead for threat intelligence at Meta, Facebook's parent company, and journalist Anne Applebaum, who stated that she believes Hunter Biden's treasonous business dealings are not "interesting."
Though GDI refuses to release its entire exclusion list, we do know which outlets comprise the top 10 "riskiest" and "worst" offenders: American Spectator, Newsmax, The Federalist, The American Conservative, One America News, The Blaze, The Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post.
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