The State Department helped defund conservative websites

By Andrea Widburg

Last week, news broke that American Thinker and other conservative internet sites were the subjects of a successful campaign to defund them by telling advertisers that their content was misleading. That’s bad. What’s worse is that we’re learning that the State Department was helping fund the campaign to defund conservative media.

The Washington Examiner revealed in a two-part report (here and here) how various organizations claimed to track “disinformation.” That “disinformation,” of course, was anything that countered the Democrat narrative on politics and social issues. American Thinker was among the list of 39 conservative sites that also included Newsbusters, Town Hall, Rush Limbaugh, Daily Wire, Breitbart, etc. Rajan Laad explained how this worked:

Corporate houses seeking to promote their products online seek the services of corporate digital ad companies to run their online advertisement campaigns.

These firms contract “disinformation” trackers to obtain private information about the “blacklisted” websites in order to avoid placing their advertisements on them.

The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British organization, and its two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups, based in Texas, are instances of such “disinformation”-trackers.

GDI claims to want to “remove the financial incentive” of spreading “disinformation” by disseminating a “dynamic exclusion list” that rates media outlets according to their “risk” factor.

The “exclusion list” is a euphemism for a blacklist, which GDI shares with ad companies.

In other words, anything conservative was “disinformation.” Armed with these politicized rankings, the ad companies that place “ad package” links on websites refused to do business with conservative sites. Chief among the blacklisting ad companies was Xandr, which Microsoft owns. The result was lost revenue on a massive scale.

There’s worse to come, though. It turns out that the State Department has been funding the Global Disinformation Index (note the third tweet in this series):

Others on the blacklist as purported disinformation purveyors: the @nypost and the @dcexaminer. The London-based group describes its mission as "Disrupting the business model of disinformation." You can download one of its relevant reports here: https://t.co/vIb8HxzoO6 /2
— Walter Olson (@walterolson) February 12, 2023

Per @gekaminsky, "GDI compiles a 'dynamic exclusion list' that it feeds to corporate entities....The list....has 'had a significant impact on the advertising revenue that has gone to those sites,' said GDI's CEO Clare Melford on a March 2022 podcast." /4
— Walter Olson (@walterolson) February 12, 2023

Here's an example found in just a click or two on GDI's website: a report warning advertisers away from "misogynistic discrimination" whose concluding example was a column by @conncarroll summarizing the views of @BradWilcoxIFS of U. Va. /6 https://t.co/Me49yRdup8
— Walter Olson (@walterolson) February 12, 2023

GDI has also listed the 10 websites it designates "least risky." On that list: NPR, ProPublica, Buzzfeed News, and HuffPost. https://t.co/N9mofr0ciS /8
— Walter Olson (@walterolson) February 12, 2023

Walter Olson, a libertarian, adds to the tweet thread above his take on what’s been going on:

What I do know is that government and its functionaries must not get involved in pressuring or "helping" advertisers on this. In practice that can mean stepping selectively on the oxygen hose of ad revenues that supplies an adversary press. /10
— Walter Olson (@walterolson) February 12, 2023

The danger, note, can come from more than one direction. At the Congressional hearings that are coming, companies must also be free from fear of official retaliation should they choose *not* to advertise. But state action that promotes blacklisting needs to end -- now. /11, efn
— Walter Olson (@walterolson) February 12, 2023

Where I differ from Olson's free-market take is that the GDI indexes weren’t transparent about what the metrics really were. Had they been honest about “this is conservative content, and that is leftist content,” then advertisers would have been making informed decisions. However, GDI sold the premise that it was dividing reputable, trustworthy content from unreputable, false content, even as it was making those decisions based solely along ideological lines.

Savvy people in the ad world undoubtedly understood what was going on and surely appreciated having a justification for defunding conservative sites but, still, the method used was disingenuous, to say the least. (On the facts as known, a class action would not be amiss.)

More importantly, the federal government has no business funding anything that seeks to decide what is good speech—or even what is honest speech—and what is not, so that the latter can be driven from the marketplace of ideas. That is completely unconstitutional in an uncomplicated way.

As a reminder, communism and fascism are the sibling children of socialism. The difference between the two is that, under communism, the government owns everything, while under fascism, the government allows private ownership but controls everything.

What we’re seeing now is exactly what happened in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany: The corporate world happily made itself a subsidiary of an all-powerful state, both because of ideological alignment and for maximum profit. (It's surely just a coincidence that, at the same time, the Democrat party is also embracing racial superiority and ever greater anti-Semitism.)