After reading this article, you might be tempted to think you’re in the wrong business. As it turns out, one can make quite a sum of cash by helping the progressive left censors its political opposition online. Indeed, there are plenty of organizations doing just that.
The Washington Examiner published a report last week detailing a new initiative to crack down on conservatives and libertarians using alternative media to get their message out to a wider swath of Americans. This one is slightly different from the censor-happy progressives’ usual modus operandi and involves going after the funding of well-known right-leaning sites like RedState, Townhall, The Blaze, Breitbart News, and others.
From the report:
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.
The report explained that brands are using corporate digital ad companies to market their products and services. At least some of these ad companies are turning to “disinformation” trackers to ascertain which sites they should and should not advertise on.
The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) is one such group to which brands turn to identify the sites that are worth advertising on. This organization compiled the list of conservative sites that supposedly publish “misinformation.”
From the Washington Examiner:
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.
It turns out that GDI isn’t hurting for money. “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,” according to the report.
The federal government has also paid GDI at least $300,000 to attack right-leaning news sites.
DoubleVerify, a publicly traded company that created an “inflammatory news index,” raked in revenue of $112 million in November 2022. It has also targeted conservative/libertarian sites for defunding.
“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,” the Washington Examiner noted.
Hacks/Hackers is a group of so-called journalists that is creating software designed to persuade Americans to counter friends, family, and other members of their communities who are supposedly trafficking in misinformation and disinformation. Of course, we already know that the definition of these two terms is: “Anything that goes against left-wing thought.”
The federal government has poured $5 million in grants into this group. The software would help people “correct misinformation” by offering “guided responses” that the technology recommends to its users.
Last, but not least, we have a consortium called the Election Integrity Project, which is an coalition of various companies who work with Big Tech to suppress right-leaning viewpoints online. “After Biden’s inauguration, each partner received millions of dollars in federal grants: Stanford and UW projects got $3 million, Graphika received $5 million, and the Atlantic Council a cool $4.7 million,” according to Liberty Nation’s Sarah Cowgill.
Censorship appears to be some good work if you can get it. Apparently, there are lots of entities – our federal government included – who are willing to spend oodles of cash to stifle the reach of conservative voices on Al Gore’s internet. The misinformation/disinformation trope is the latest effort on the part of the progressive left to avoid debate by simply shutting down viewpoints that contradict its ideology and they have the resources to pursue this agenda. The question is: Will it work?
