U-S Helps Fund 'Disinformation' Monitoring Group

The U-S State Department is indirectly bankrolling a "disinformation" monitoring group that has targeted non-liberal and conservative news organizations.

A British organization called the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) with ties to a pair of American nonprofits is feeding blacklists to ad companies with the intent of defunding and shutting down websites peddling alleged ‘disinformation,’" according to the Washington Examiner.

The Examiner reported the group "has received $330,000 from two State Department-backed entities linked to the highest levels of government" and is "likely costing the news organizations vital advertising dollars."

The group may remind Americans of President Biden’s short-lived Disinformation Governance Board that was scrapped in May 2022 after board director Nina Jankowicz and the group itself faced overwhelming backlash. 

GDI gathers a "dynamic exclusion list" that it provides to major companies such as Microsoft’s Xandr, according to the report that cites emails as evidence. 

"Xandr and other companies are, in turn, declining to place ads on websites that GDI flags as peddling disinformation," reporter Gabe Kaminsky wrote. 

The Examiner is on the list itself, Kaminsky reported, along with "at least 2,000 websites."

GDI has also identified the 10 "riskiest" news organizations, which includes the New York Post, who broke the Hunter Biden laptop story that was censored by Big Tech outlets and falsely dismissed as Russian disinformation in some media outlets. The laptop has since been authenticated by a variety of news organizations and Hunter Biden’s own attorney essentially owned up to it earlier this year before backtracking. 

RealClearPolitics, Reason and the Federalist are also among the websites named. 

The GDI-tied National Endowment for Democracy received over $300 million from the State Department in 2021, according to the report that cited financial records.