The Disinformation Industry has been hard at work behind the scenes, making sure that conservative sites are hit in the pocketbooks. The goal is to de-monetize and de-platform them, and while we’ve known about some of these efforts, some are just now coming to light thanks to some good reporting from some of the various outlets labeled as “misinformation” or “disinformation.”

The Washington Examiner has been one of those outlets digging in, and they have been dropping a series of pieces about the combined efforts of Big Tech, the government, and activist groups working together to minimize the impact of conservative sites.

The Disinformation Industry was exposed in the Examiner‘s coverage, and it appears to have had an impact.

Now, if you missed the original reporting, here are the basics:

According to the Washington Examiner, new information has been discovered about a low-profile attempt to target conservative sites by blacklisting them for various “safety” reasons. This includes sites such as Daily Wire, Newsmax, Epoch Times, and even RedState.

The Examiner revealed the existence of the “Global Disinformation Index,” a British organization with two American affiliates. This company is responsible for giving blacklists to ad companies like Xandr to restrict ad dollars and break conservative websites financially, effectively silencing them.

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Unsurprisingly, websites deemed “less risky” have leftist biases, including NPR, Washington Post, and the New York Times. BuzzFeed and ProPublica did not appear in the dataset but were “approved” for ads by GDI.

This list becomes more sinister when you see that Democrats in Congress are attached to it. As the Washington Examiner notes, GDI accepted $250,000 in 2021 from the State Department via The National Endowment for Democracy, a non-profit authorized through congress.

But the good news is that Microsoft appears to be backing away from GDI, and its “Xandr” ad system will no longer be using the GDI blacklist to cut off sites.

The Microsoft-owned Xandr, a major advertising company, previously abided by a secret blacklist of conservative news compiled by the Global Disinformation Index, a British organization with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups. Now, as Microsoft appears to be taking steps to distance itself from GDI , the company has, for the time being, deleted flags such as “false/misleading” and “reprehensible/offensive” for right-leaning websites, data show.

“I just checked in Xandr’s platform again and can confirm that all rejection flags have been removed from domains,” a senior executive in the ad industry, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, told the Washington Examiner.

Xandr had labeled 39 conservative domains as, overwhelmingly, “false/misleading,” the Washington Examiner reported on Friday. Townhall, a website under a Christian publisher called Salem Media Group, was flagged as “reprehensible/offensive.”

Backing off that blacklist is a good start, but the fact that Microsoft had signed on with seemingly no questions asked does reinforce what we have long suspected – that large corporations are all too willing to sign on to lists that block conservative input, and it seems increasingly likely that progressives, not content with their stagnating political strength, have opted to take over boardrooms along with their remaining statehouses in an effort to push their ideology out.

And, sadly, it’s working. Corporations have easily trended toward the woke in an effort to go along with what the left loudly preaches at them. Their rhetoric, protest, and amplifying their message through friendly media outlets and platforms have made these companies bend the knee. However, it’s the inclusion of State Department dollars that takes this from just corporate scandal to an actual First Amendment issue. Government money being using to hurt the pocketbooks of conservative outlets? That’s way less than ideal.

This is a fight that conservative media cannot afford to ignore.