Global Disinformation Index

Last updated
Global Disinformation Index
Disinformation Index Ltd
Formation2018
Type State organization
Legal statusCompany limited by guarantee (registered in England & Wales)
Location
Key people
 Clare Melford, Daniel Rogers
Website www.disinformationindex.org

Global Disinformation Index (GDI) is a US State Department Funded non-profit based in the United Kingdom [1] [2] which aims to mitigate the spread of disinformation on the internet. [3] [4] [5] The group utilises a system of ratings of news sources and websites to determine risk of disinformation. [6] The group's efforts also include investigations into internet advertising, [7] and the alleged use of disinformation in relation to COVID-19 featured on various websites. [4] The group has faced scrutiny over potential political bias. [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14]

Contents

Overview

GDI was founded in 2018 [15] by Clare Melford, Alexandra Mousavizadeh and Daniel Rogers, [16] [17] and has received funding through a combination of charitable trusts, governmental organizations, and ad tech licensees of its dynamic exclusion list. Contributors include the Knight Foundation, [18] [15] [19] Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), [20] and Luminate Group. [21]

One of its strategies promoted by GDI is the aim to remove financial incentives for news content that promotes "adversarial narratives"[ clarification needed ]. [15] [22] GDI's investigation of COVID-19 disinformation focused on the generation of illicit revenue for websites. [23]

GDI has reported that a recent[ when? ] evaluation of Italian online news sites resulted in categorising one third of the evaluated sites as high risk of disinformation. [24]

Reception

GDI's alleged bias was first reported by the Washington Examiner , a U.S. conservative website, which released an investigative series in February 2023 that said GDI was "part of a stealth operation blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news companies large sums in advertising dollars". [25] The journalist who authored that series of stories, Gabe Kaminsky, pointed out that all 10 outlets that GDI in a report [26] identified as the "riskiest" and "worst" all leaned to the political right while all but one of the 10 ranked "least risky" leaned to the political left. [25] Kaminsky said that GDI received $100,000 from the U.S. Department of State. [27] [28] [29] However, the State Department has denied that the grant was used to "blacklist" any companies in the U.S. [30] [31]

The series in the Washington Examiner sparked outcry among conservatives, and prompted a lawsuit by The Daily Wire and The Federalist , two U.S. right-wing websites, against the State Department. [32] [33] The State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy announced in 2023 that it would no longer fund GDI. [34] After the series of stories, Microsoft's Xandr cut ties with GDI and exited the political advertising space. [35] [36] Congress passed a law in 2023 that banned the Pentagon from funding GDI in the future for military recruitment advertising. [37]

In April 2024, UnHerd CEO Freddie Sayers criticized GDI after it placed UnHerd on its "dynamic exclusion list", leading to a reduction in UnHerd's advertising revenue. [38] [39] Sayers argued that GDI's determination was based on ideological disagreements rather than factual inaccuracies. [11] [40] In response, Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, called for GDI to be shut down. [41]

Following UnHerd's article, UK Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch joined around 10 MPs in raising concerns about GDI and their approach to distinguishing between free speech and disinformation. [42] In response to Badenoch's concerns, Foreign Secretary David Cameron stated that FCDO had ceased funding GDI in 2023 and did not plan to resume funding. [43] [40]

Advisory panel

Until March 2023, GDI publicly disclosed members of its "Advisory Panel". Amongst others, these have included Anne Applebaum, Peter Pomerantsev, Miguel Martinez and Hany Farid. [44] Reason reported in February 2023 that Applebaum had asked for her name to removed from the GDI website as she had not been in contact with GDI since 2019. [45]

See also

Related Research Articles

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The Heritage Foundation is an American conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1973, it took a leading role in the conservative movement in the 1980s during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose policies were taken from Heritage Foundation studies, including its Mandate for Leadership.

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Black Press Group Ltd. (BPG) is a Canadian commercial printer and newspaper publisher founded in 1975 by David Holmes Black, who has no relation to Canadian-born media mogul Conrad Black. Based in Surrey, British Columbia, it was previously owned by the publisher of Toronto Star and Black (80.65%).

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clare Melford</span> Businessperson

Clare Melford was the CEO of the International Business Leaders Forum from November 2010 until she stepped down in November 2012.

State-sponsored Internet propaganda is Internet manipulation and propaganda that is sponsored by a state. States have used the Internet, particularly social media to influence elections, sow distrust in institutions, spread rumors, spread disinformation, typically using bots to create and spread contact. Propaganda is used internally to control populations, and externally to influence other societies.

Fake news websites are websites on the Internet that deliberately publish fake news—hoaxes, propaganda, and disinformation purporting to be real news—often using social media to drive web traffic and amplify their effect. Unlike news satire, these websites deliberately seek to be perceived as legitimate and taken at face value, often for financial or political gain. Fake news websites monetize their content by exploiting the vulnerabilities of programmatic ad trading, which is a type of online advertising in which ads are traded through machine-to-machine auction in a real-time bidding system.

NewsGuard is a rating system for news and information websites. It is accessible via browser extensions and mobile apps. According to NewsGuard, its team of "expert journalists" score publishers on a scale of 0–100 based on whether they have transparent finances or publish many errors, among other criteria. NewsGuard Technologies Inc., the company behind the tool, also provides services such as misinformation tracking and brand safety for advertisers, search engines, social media platforms, cybersecurity firms, and government agencies.

UnHerd is a British news and opinion website founded in July 2017, which describes itself as a platform for slow journalism.

Fix the Court is an advocacy group that seeks reform of the U.S. federal court system. The group lobbies for term limits for members of the U.S. Supreme Court, for streaming live audio and video of the court's oral arguments, and for publicizing potential conflicts of interest among justices. Fix the Court submitted multiple Freedom of Information Act requests related to the Supreme Court nominations of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, as well as for all 25 people that former President Donald Trump put on his shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees.

<i>The Grayzone</i> US-based fringe news website and blog

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Arabella Advisors is a Washington, D.C.–based for-profit consulting company that advises left-leaning donors and nonprofits about where to give money and serves as the hub of a politically liberal "dark money" network. It was founded by former Clinton administration appointee Eric Kessler. The Arabella network spent nearly $1.2 billion in 2020 and raised $1.6 billion that same year. In 2022, Arabella raised $1.3 billion and spent $900 million. In 2023, Arabella raised more than $1.3 billion in anonymous donations and sent nearly $1.5 billion to other organizations. Between Arabella's founding in 2005 and 2021, Arabella took in $6.5 billion, the vast majority of which flowed to policy and litigation groups on the left.

The New Venture Fund is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization managed by Arabella Advisors, a for-profit consulting company that advises left-leaning donors and nonprofits about where to give money and serves as the hub of a politically liberal "dark money" network in the United States. The New Venture Fund serves as the fiscal sponsor for various left-leaning political projects. The New Venture Fund has annual revenue of nearly $1 billion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disinformation Governance Board</span> Board of the United States Department of Homeland Security

The Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) was an advisory board of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), from April 27, 2022 to August 24, 2022. The board's stated function was to protect national security by disseminating guidance to DHS agencies on combating misinformation, malinformation, and disinformation that threatens the security of the homeland. Specific problem areas mentioned by the DHS included false information propagated by human smugglers encouraging migrants to surge to the Mexico–United States border, as well as Russian-state disinformation on election interference and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Global Engagement Center</span> U.S. federal government agency

The Global Engagement Center (GEC) was an agency within the Bureau of Global Public Affairs at the United States Department of State. Established in 2016, its mission was to lead U.S. government efforts to "recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations" around the world. GEC closed on December 23, 2024.

References

  1. ↑ Bakir, V., & McStay, A. (2023). As of January 27th, 2025, the funding Global Disinformation Index received from the Global Engagement Center has been a matter of public record through Matt Taibbi's YouTube channel Racket. These records were obtained by FOIA requests made by the journalist Gabe Kaminsky. Defending the Civic Body from False Information Online. In Optimising Emotions, Incubating Falsehoods: How to Protect the Global Civic Body from Disinformation and Misinformation (pp. 205-246). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
  2. ↑ Privacy. GDI. Accessed 26 April 2024.
  3. ↑ Salehi, H., & Kardouni, N. (2023). Fake News and Disinformation in the Perspective of International Peace and Security. Journal of Legal Studies, 15(2), 321-353.
  4. 1 2 Zendelovski, G., & Cvetkovski, S. (2021). The Pandemic of Fake News and Disinformation in the Age of Deglobalization. Security Dialogues.
  5. ↑ Pratelli, M., & Petrocchi, M. (2022). A Structured Analysis of Journalistic Evaluations for News Source Reliability. arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.02736.
  6. ↑ Glazunova, S., Dehghan, E., FitzGerald, K. M., Wikstrom, P., & Myint, Z. (2021). Disinformation Risk Assessment: The online news market in Australia.
  7. ↑ Aaronson, S. (2021). Can Trade Agreements Solve the Wicked Problem of Disinformation (No. 2021-12).
  8. ↑ Myers, Steven Lee (December 14, 2023). "State Dept.'s Fight Against Disinformation Comes Under Attack". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 25, 2024. Retrieved April 26, 2024– via NYTimes.com.
  9. ↑ Farber, Alex (April 22, 2024). "Foreign Office link to 'biased' report on unreliable news sites". Archived from the original on April 18, 2024. Retrieved April 26, 2024– via www.thetimes.co.uk.
  10. ↑ "Hugh Linehan: Who watches the watchers when it comes to disinformation?". The Irish Times. Archived from the original on 2024-04-22. Retrieved 2024-04-26.
  11. 1 2 Sayers, Freddie (17 April 2024). "Inside the disinformation industry". UnHerd .
  12. ↑ "Der "Global Disinformation Index" bekämpft auch missliebige Meinungen" (in German). 19 April 2024. Archived from the original on 22 April 2024. Retrieved 26 April 2024.
  13. ↑ "A combination of self-delusion and self-righteousness is a surefire way for experts to lose our trust". The Boston Globe. 9 May 2024. Archived from the original on 20 May 2024. Retrieved 20 May 2024.
  14. ↑ "The Times view on press ratings agencies: Arbiters of Truth". The Times. 13 May 2024. Archived from the original on 20 May 2024. Retrieved 20 May 2024.
  15. 1 2 3 Disinformation index Archived 2024-04-29 at the Wayback Machine www.rand.org. Accessed 26 April 2024.
  16. ↑ Alexandra Mousavizadeh is listed as a founder Archived 2024-04-29 at the Wayback Machine by Rand Corp.
  17. ↑ About Archived 2024-04-23 at the Wayback Machine . GDI. Accessed 26 April 2024.
  18. ↑ Ignatidou, S. (2019). EU–US cooperation on tackling disinformation. International Security Department. September.
  19. ↑ "Knight Research Network". Knight Foundation. Archived from the original on 2024-04-18. Retrieved 2024-04-26.
  20. ↑ "Written questions, answers and statements - UK Parliament". Archived from the original on 2024-04-18. Retrieved 2024-04-26.
  21. ↑ "Global Disinformation Index". www.luminategroup.com.
  22. ↑ "FKN0058 - Evidence on Disinformation and 'fake news'". Archived from the original on 2024-04-17. Retrieved 2024-04-26.
  23. ↑ Verrall, N. (2022). COVID-19 Disinformation, misinformation and malinformation during the pandemic infodemic: a view from the United Kingdom. In COVID-19 disinformation: a multi-national, whole of society perspective (pp. 81-112). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
  24. ↑ Lesser, M., Stern, H. J., & Terp, S. J. (2022). Countering Russian Misinformation, Disinformation, Malinformation and Influence Campaigns in Italy Surrounding the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. In IFDaD.
  25. 1 2 Kaminsky, Gabe (2023-02-09). "Disinformation Inc: Meet the groups hauling in cash to secretly blacklist conservative news - Washington Examiner" . Retrieved 2024-06-23.
  26. ↑ "Brief: Disinformation Risk in the United States Online Media Market, October 2022" (archived), disinformationindex.org, 21 October 2022.
  27. ↑ Kaminsky, Gabe (2023-02-10). "Disinformation Inc: State Department bankrolls group secretly blacklisting conservative media - Washington Examiner" . Retrieved 2024-06-23.
  28. ↑ Flood, Brian (2023-02-15). "State Department funds 'disinformation' index targeting non-liberal and conservative news outlets: report". Fox News. Retrieved 2024-06-23.
  29. ↑ Soave, Robby (2023-02-14). "U.S. State Department funds a disinformation index that warns advertisers to avoid 'Reason'". Reason.com. Retrieved 2024-06-23.
  30. ↑ Board, Editorial (2024-03-19). "Opinion | Don't defund the fight against Russia and China's disinformation". Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 2024-07-08.
  31. ↑ Raymond, Nate (December 6, 2023). "Texas claims US State Department funds tech that censors conservative news". Reuters .
  32. ↑ "Daily Wire Censorship Claims Survive Against State Department". news.bloomberglaw.com. Retrieved 2024-06-23.
  33. ↑ "NCLA Defeats Motion to Dismiss, Wins Expedited Discovery in Suit Alleging State Dept. Censorship". Morningstar, Inc. 2024-05-07. Retrieved 2024-06-23.
  34. ↑ Kaminsky, Gabe (2023-02-20). "Disinformation Inc: State Department-backed group cuts ties with group blacklisting conservative news - Washington Examiner" . Retrieved 2024-06-23.
  35. ↑ Fischer, Sara (July 27, 2023). "Microsoft's Xandr bans political ads". Axios.
  36. ↑ Kaminsky, Gabe (2023-02-11). "Disinformation Inc: Microsoft suspends relationship with group blacklisting conservative news - Washington Examiner" . Retrieved 2024-06-23.
  37. ↑ Kaminsky, Gabe (2023-12-11). "Inside the GOP's tense negotiations with Democrats to ban Pentagon-funded 'censorship' - Washington Examiner" . Retrieved 2024-06-23.
  38. ↑ Ponsford, Dominic (23 April 2024). "'Anti-trans narratives' see Unherd put on advertising blacklist". Press Gazette. Retrieved 20 June 2024.
  39. ↑ Linehan, High (20 April 2024). "Who watches the watchers when it comes to disinformation?". The Irish Times. Archived from the original on 20 April 2024. Retrieved 20 June 2024.
  40. 1 2 Farber, Alex (10 May 2024). "Cameron says government has stopped funding disinformation index". The Times. Archived from the original on 11 May 2024. Retrieved 11 May 2024.
  41. ↑ Earle, A (2024). "Elon Musk: Global Disinformation Index should be shut down." UnHerd. April 19 2024. Accessed May 10 2024.
  42. ↑ Farber, Alex (19 April 2024). "MPs oppose funding disinformation ratings agency in blacklisting row". The Times. Archived from the original on 12 May 2024. Retrieved 11 May 2024.
  43. ↑ Earle, A (2024). "David Cameron: Government will no longer fund Global Disinformation Index." Archived 2024-05-10 at the Wayback Machine UnHerd. May 9 2024. Accessed May 10 2024.
  44. ↑ "Our Story - Advisory Plan". Global Disinformation Index. Archived from the original on 10 February 2023. Retrieved 22 June 2024.
  45. ↑ Soave, Robby (28 February 2023). "Global Disinformation Index, Inform Thyself". Reason. Retrieved 22 June 2024.
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