Disinformation Inc: Meet the groups hauling in cash to secretly blacklist conservative news

by Gabe Kaminsky, Investigative Reporter1 of 3February 09, 2023

This is the first part of a Washington Examiner investigative series about self-styled 'disinformation' tracking organizations that are cracking down on conservative media and part of a lucrative operation that aims to defund disfavored speech.

EXCLUSIVE — Well-funded "disinformation" tracking groups are part of a stealth operation blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news companies large sums in advertising dollars, a Washington Examiner investigation found.

Major ad companies are increasingly seeking guidance from purportedly "nonpartisan" groups claiming to be detecting and fighting online "disinformation." These same "disinformation" monitors are compiling secret website blacklists and feeding them to ad companies, with the aim of defunding and shutting down disfavored speech, according to sources familiar with the situation, public memos, and emails obtained by the Washington Examiner.

Brands, which have been seeking to promote products online through multiple websites to expand their digital footprint, are turning to corporate digital ad companies keyed into global markets. In turn, some of these companies are contracting "disinformation" trackers to obtain private information about which websites they should purportedly "defund."

The Global Disinformation Index, a British group with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups sharing similar board members, is one entity shaping the ad world behind the scenes. GDI's CEO is Clare Melford, former senior vice president for MTV Networks, and its executive director is Daniel Rogers, a tech advisory board member for Human Rights First, a left-leaning nonprofit group that says disinformation fuels "violent extremism and public health crises."

"It's devastating," Mike Benz, the State Department's ex-deputy assistant for internal communications and information policy, told the Washington Examiner. "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."

GDI's mission is to "remove the financial incentive" to create "disinformation," and its "core output" is a secretive "dynamic exclusion list" that rates news outlets based on their alleged disinformation "risk" factor, according to its website. There are at least 2,000 websites on this exclusion list, which has "had a significant impact on the advertising revenue that has gone to those sites," Melford said on a March 2022 podcast episode hosted by the Safety Tech Innovation Network, a British government-backed group.

Along with similar organizations, GDI has been raking in cash as funding pours into disinformation tracking. Its charity in San Antonio, Texas, posted $345,000 in revenue in 2020, while its affiliated private foundation saw its roughly $19,600 revenue jump in 2019 to over $569,000 in 2020, according to tax records.

One influential ad company that has subscribed to GDI's exclusion list to defund outlets purportedly spreading disinformation is Xandr, which Microsoft bought from AT&T in 2021 for $1 billion, according to emails leaked to the Washington Examiner.

Xandr informed companies in September 2022 that it would begin adopting GDI's exclusion list to punish content that is "morally reprehensible or patently offensive," lacking "redeeming social value," or "could include false or misleading information," emails show.

"To enforce this change, Xandr is partnering with the Global Disinformation Index ('GDI') and will be adopting their exclusion list," Xandr wrote to other companies, linking to an appeal "webform" for publishers to complete if they disagree with their "risk" rating.

This exclusion list is developed with oversight from GDI's "advisory panel," which counts journalists, professors, and data scientists, according to GDI reports. Three advisers include Ben Nimmo, global lead for threat intelligence at Facebook's parent company Meta, journalist Anne Applebaum, who said Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings are not "interesting," and University of Washington professor Franziska Roesner.

One source close to ad-buying operations in right-leaning media told the Washington Examiner that the outlet is on GDI's exclusion list, citing communications with ad companies. But the Washington Examiner was never contacted by GDI or informed of how it failed to meet GDI's standards.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/technology/disinformation-conservative-media-censored-blacklists

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/technology/disinformation-conservative-media-censored-blacklists

>>18314849

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But GDI, which did not reply to several requests for its exclusion list, discloses in reports which outlets it identifies as the "riskiest" and "worst" offenders for peddling disinformation. These 10, which all skew to the right, are the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post.

"The American Conservative had one of the lowest scores in the study for bias, indicating that almost all of the content sampled was either somewhat or entirely biased," said GDI, which did not clarify how its ratings may differ for websites publishing news or mostly opinion articles.

GDI's "disinformation" tracking efforts, however, have even resulted in opinions being flagged. The organization alleged in an October 2022 memo that a Washington Examiner commentary article titled "The Left's gender-bending obsession is tiresome and absurd" was "anti-LGBTQ+" disinformation.

That same memo singled out Amazon for hosting ads in the Washington Examiner.

Screenshot/GDI, October 2022 report

Further, according to a senior executive at a company that buys ads in digital outlets,

Breitbart News is on GDI's exclusion list.

Melford cited Breitbart in her 2022 podcast appearance, noting that a "whole ecosystem of organizations" targeting the outlet has led to it being deplatformed.

Topics that have recently spawned "disinformation" allegedly relate to COVID-19, anti-vaccine content, mask protests, abortion, and alleged voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election, Melford said. She added that "disinformation narratives" have also taken hold around the idea "that there's a corrupt elite working only for themselves, not serving the will of the common man, and that only a strong man can get rid of the corrupt elite."

The Washington Examiner also spoke with a member of GDI's advisory panel who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about internal operations. The member claimed they haven't played a role in crafting the exclusion list but said that "disinformation" labeling, in general, could "definitely" appear to be cloaked censorship.

"This is the concern," said the member, adding it "sounds plausible" that any website on the index's riskiest list would also "probably" be on the exclusion list. Other ad buyers close to conservative media who contract with multiple outlets, as well as tech analysts, agreed with this sentiment.

But GDI has been transparent about its goal in labeling certain websites as purveyors of disinformation. The organization submitted a report to the United Nations that said it is "seeking to defund disinformation" and break "the incentive to create it for the purpose of garnering advertising revenues."

That same report called on "governments around the world" to examine their policies for addressing disinformation and enact "stringent repercussions" for culprits.

The "whole point" of the "disinformation" tracking industry is clearly to destroy "the reach, scalability, market, and even credibility" of conservative news outlets, added Benz, now executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online, a censorship watchdog.

On the flip side, all of the websites that GDI ranks as the "least risky" lean left in their news coverage — minus the Wall Street Journal.

These include NPR, ProPublica, the Associated Press, Insider, the New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, Buzzfeed News, and HuffPost, according to a 27-page report.

The outlets purportedly show "minimal bias" and a lack of "sensational language" and have "excelled in disclosing and following their operational policies and practices," said the report. Still, many of these "least" risky outlets, such as Buzzfeed, promoted the Steele dossier, a discredited piece of opposition research that Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign fed to the FBI to link Donald Trump to Russia.

Others, such as HuffPost, have published numerous stories boosting the falsehood that a New York Post story on Hunter Biden's infamous abandoned laptop was "Russian disinformation."

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/technology/disinformation-conservative-media-censored-blacklists

>>18314871

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"The Left’s censorship efforts are anti-American, and conservatives should oppose them regardless of whether they originate in the private sector or in the White House," Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) told the Washington Examiner.

Screenshot/GDI report: "Disinformation Risk Assessment: The Online News Market in the United States."

GDI is not alone among groups blacklisting certain websites while coordinating with ad companies.

Another is DoubleVerify, a $4 billion publicly traded company that operates an "inflammatory news index" that clients can gain access to. Content from websites gets added to the index if it contains "blatant opinion statements in non-editorial content," violence incitement, or "the use of slurs when referring to public figures," according to

DoubleVerify.

DoubleVerify, which posted its highest revenue of $112 million in November 2022, does not publicize outlets or content on its index.

However, Breitbart and Newsbusters, as well as the left-leaning website RawStory, have been included in it, according to a 2016 Wired report. So has WND.com, DoubleVerify told the New York Times in 2016.

The Washington Examiner has also been labeled as "inflammatory," according to emails and an ad-buying source close to the matter.

Because of this, the outlet has run into ad problems with Comcast, Facebook, and Google, among others, emails show.

GDI and DoubleVerify are also linked to Integral Ad Science, an ad verification company worth over $1.6 billion that uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to rate alleged disinformation. IAS uses a technology that blocks ads from appearing on client pages deemed "too risky for their brand," according to a 2017 report.

IAS, which partners with the GDI to evaluate websites, teamed up with DoubleVerify in January to assist Twitter with a "brand safety" operation, according to a press release.

Through this new initiative,Twitter will be informed by IAS and DoubleVerifyif the companies determine that ad groups share allegedly inappropriate content, TechCrunch reported.

"Unfortunately, this leveraging of AI technology for censorship is the gold standard now," Benz said. "AI is the censorship workhorse, the secret sauce, and virtually no professional disinformation company in 2023 enters the industry without some AI tech aspect to their censorship scheme— whether that's AI for identifying posts, for flagging posts, for sorting targeted online communities, or for mapping interrelations between different targeted online communities."

IAS has released dozens of recommendations through the years to brands on how to combat "fake news" and extremist" websites. One includes urging companies to "use a combination of exclusion lists," which it has claimed, separately, may not go far "enough" in fighting "fraud."

The Global Disinformation Index did not reply to several Washington Examiner requests for comment, nor did DoubleVerify or IAS.

So much for thinking Twitter will get any better with Musk, many say it's worse, and since he needs ad money, these psychos and AI will be crawling all over.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/technology/disinformation-conservative-media-censored-blacklists

Twitter Execs Testify That Their Election-Meddling Decisions Were Even Flimsier Than Previously Claimed By: Margot Cleveland February 09, 2023 1 of 2

Twitter executives being beholden to so-called experts’ tweets is hardly better than doing the FBI’s bidding.

When the New York Post dropped its bombshell reporting on documents recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in October of 2020, Twitter did not reach out to the FBI to ask whether the reporting was Russian disinformation — despite extensive coordination with the FBI to prepare to combat foreign election interference. Instead, according to testimony at Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing,Twitter relied on the tweets of supposed experts, making the tech giant’s decision to censor the Post’s story even more outrageous.

The House Oversight Committee, now in the hands of Republicans, questioned four former Twitter executives on their decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., pushed Twitter’s former global head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, to explain the timing of Twitter’s decision to censor the New York Post story.

Biggs noted that in an 8:51 a.m. email on Oct. 14, 2020, Roth had taken the position that the laptop “isn’t clearly violative of our Hacked Materials Policy.”

But then, by 10:12, Roth emailed his colleagues with Twitter’s decision to censor the story, stating that “the key factor informing our approach is consensus from experts monitoring election security and disinformation that this looks a lot like a hack-and-leak operation.”

What cybersecurity experts had Roth consulted between 9 a.m. and 10:15 a.m. on Oct. 14, 2020, the morning the Post story broke, Biggs asked the former Twitter executive.

Roth responded that the experts were ones the Twitter heads were following on the platform. “We were following discussions about this as they unfolded on Twitter,” Roth explained. “Cybersecurity experts were tweeting about this incident and sharing their perspectives, and that informed some of Twitter’s judgment here.”

Rep. Kelly Armstrong, R-N.D., was incredulous: “After 2016, you set up all these teams to deal with Russian interference, foreign interference, having regular meetings with the FBI, you have connections with all of these different government agencies, and you didn’t reach out to them once?”

“That’s right,” Roth said, noting he didn’t think it would be appropriate.

Instead, Twitter relied on the tweets of supposed national security experts.

Who those experts were, Roth didn’t say, but here we have another strange coincidence: In his testimony on Wednesday, Roth told the committee that a few weeks before the Post story dropped, he had participated in an exercise hosted by the Aspen Institute, with other media outlets and social media companies, that posed a hack and leak October surprise involving Hunter Biden. Roth testified that Garrett Graff facilitated that event.

And at 8:23 a.m. on Oct. 14, 2020, after the Post story broke, Graff tweeted his playbook for how the media should react to “this Biden-Burisma crap.”

(Garret Graff 1 tweet)

Graff followed about some 10 minutes later, tweeting, “Also, what a TOTAL coincidence that this fake Hunter Biden scandal drops the literal day after it becomes clear that both of Bill Barr’s other intended October surprises—the Durham investigation and the unmasking investigation—have fallen apart??!”

(Garret Graff tweet)

Not long after Graff began pushing the “fake” Hunter Biden scandal narrative, Vivian Schiller joined in, calling the Hunter Biden story “nonsense” and claiming Graff’s exercise was “to test readiness of some MSM.”

(Vivian Schiller tweet)

And who is Schiller? According to Graff, Schiller “designed and ran” the Hunter Biden tabletop exercise that Roth participated in. She was also the former head of news at Twitter, in addition to previously being the CEO of NPR, among other gigs.

In addition to Graff and Schiller, CNN’s consultant and so-called national-security expert weighed in at 8:23 a.m., questioning the “amplifying” of the New York Post’s story, stressing that “amplification is the key to disinformation.”

(Juliet Kayyem tweet)

https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/09/twitter-execs-testify-that-their-election-meddling-decisions-were-even-flimsier-than-previously-claimed/

>>18314958

Roth has been lying his ass off from the start, he won't even confirm an email from him is his….this is so retarded Twitter censors people, by reading tweets of journalists to determine if something with disinformation.We have a very retarded nation

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Natasha Bertrand also tweeted an early morning “warning” that a Russian agent had been “teasing misleading or edited Biden material for nearly a year.”

(Natasha Bertrand tweet)

Bertrand, also known as Fusion Natasha for falling for Fusion GPS’s Steele dossier and Alfa Bank hoax, was joined in pushing the disinformation narrative by The Washington Post’s alleged fact-checker Glenn Kessler.

By 8:30 a.m., Kessler had shared The Washington Post’s policy “regarding hacked or leaked materials,” and told Twitter users to “be careful what is in your social media feeds.”

(Glenn Kessler tweet)

Mother Jones’ D.C. bureau chief David Corn followed with a 9:07 tweet declaring that the “whole story” was predicated on “false Fox/Giuliani talking points” and pronouncing the Post as advancing “disinformation.”

(Corn Tweet)

Twitter’s decision to censor the Hunter Biden story was bad enough before, but to think the executives may have relied on so-called experts like these raises the outrage another octave.

Former Twitter Deputy General Counsel James Baker likewise indicated in an email that he had “seen some reliable cybersecurity folks question the authenticity of the emails in another way (i.e., that there is no metadata pertaining to them that has been released and the formatting looks like they could be complete fabrications.)” Baker, however, did not say whether he had spoken with the “cybersecurity folks,” and given that when pushed by the committee he hid behind attorney-client privilege, getting any more answers from Baker seems unlikely.

(Baker email)

Beyond learning that Twitter executives opted to rely on the tweets of so-called experts over asking the FBI if the laptop was fake, Wednesday’s hearing consisted mainly of grandstanding — some on both sides of the aisle — and Democrats attempting to make the hearing about Trump when they weren’t complaining that the entire session was a waste of time. One additional salient fact came out, however, in addition to a review of the basics of Twitter’s censorship efforts.

Specifically, Roth clarified for the House committee that the FBI had not previously warned that an expected “hack-and-leak” operation was rumored to likely involve Hunter Biden. Rather, according toRoth’s testimony, the rumor that the hack-and-leak operation would target the Biden son came from another tech company.

Roth claimed in his Wednesday testimony that his Dec. 21, 2020, statement to the Federal Election Commission was being misinterpreted. In that statement, Roth had attested that “since 2018 he had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security.” His signed declaration then noted that the “expectations of hack-and-leak operations were discussed throughout 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”

According to Roth, he should have worded his statement differently because it was not the FBI that had raised Hunter Biden as a potential subject of the hack and leak, but a peer company. One would think, however, that Roth would have clarified this point to his lawyer some two-plus years ago when Twitter’s Covington & Burling attorney represented to the FEC in a cover letter that accompanied Roth’s statement that “reports from the law enforcement agencies even suggested there were rumors that such a hack-and-leak operation would be related to Hunter Biden.”

Clearly, the former Twitter executives seek to separate themselves from the FBI, but “The Twitter Files” make that next to impossible to accomplish. And, really, being beholden to the so-called experts tweeting out warnings of supposed Russian disinformation would hardly be an improvement.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/09/twitter-execs-testify-that-their-election-meddling-decisions-were-even-flimsier-than-previously-claimed/

Who's that weird guy staring towards Grassley sitting next to Turley

https://www.c-span.org/video/?525922-1/hearing-oversight-justice-department&vod

>>18315095

Grassley keeps on saying, "And Guess What"?

>>18315095

Ron Johnson said in his speech at the Committee: him and Grassley were the ones in 2018 to find and released the highly partisan texts of Strzock-Page

>>18315243 I think they found the texts in 2017

>>18315237

Raskin is a total asshole!Why did they let him speak?