The editor of a UK media website told a parliamentary hearing the company was deprived of advertising revenue because a government-funded private company labelled its writers’ opinion pieces as “disinformation.”
Freddie Sayers, the editor of UnHerd, appeared before a House of Lords select committee on the future of news on April 16 at which the subject of “disinformation” was discussed.
Mr. Sayers, who was editor-in-chief of YouGov polling agency before joining UnHerd, said that last year, the publication decided to put adverts on its website and went to three successive ad agencies, but only got a small fraction of the advertisers they expected, given their readership.
The third company revealed the reason for this was down to a third-party tech company they were using, Grapeshot, which used a company called the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) to obtain information about “brand safety” as a filtering process for potential clients who might buy adverts.
Grapeshot had placed UnHerd on a so-called “Dynamic Exclusion List,” Mr. Sayers said, meaning that it was effectively flagged up as an outlet companies might not want to be associated with as it could damage their brand.
When he probed further as to what the reason for this effective blacklisting was, Mr. Sayers said he was told it was because UnHerd had hosted so-called “gender critical” writers and academics, including Julie Bindel and Professor Kathleen Stock.
The beliefs expressed by Ms. Bindel, Ms. Stock, and countless others are not unlawful, nor classed as “hate speech,” and being “gender critical” is in fact a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010.
But Mr. Sayers was told that UnHerd was considered to have platformed “anti-trans” and “anti-LGBT” narratives, even though one of these articles was written by trans-identified writer, Debbie Hayton.
Mr. Sayers said in a video shared to social media platform X that he believes UnHerd’s experience has uncovered “a worldwide system of censorship that crosses continents and that we think more people need to know about.”
‘Self-Appointed Organisation’ Deciding on Disinformation
Mr. Sayers described the situation as “a weird scenario where a self-appointed organisation is deciding that an explicitly legal and majority held view is enough to get an entire website blocked from international ad agencies.”The GDI was founded in 2018 with its stated objective being “disrupt the business model of disinformation” by ensuring “advertisers’ money and brands do not end up supporting high risk websites.”
The online biography of co-founder Clare Melford is published by the World Economic Forum and states that she worked as a management consultant for media and “led the transition of the European Council on Foreign Relations from being part of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation to independent status.”
‘Something Can Be Accurate but Still Extremely Harmful’
In an interview hosted by the London School of Economics, Ms. Melford said, “A lot of disinformation is not just whether something is true or false—it escapes from the limits of fact-checking.”“Something can be factually accurate but still extremely harmful … [the GDI] leads you to a more useful definition of disinformation … It’s not saying something is or is not disinformation, but it is saying that content on this site or this particular article is content that is anti-immigrant, content that is anti-women, content that is anti-Semitic.”
While some of the ratings are done by humans, chiefly for larger traffic websites, the GDI mainly uses bots to determine its ratings for smaller outlets.
According to Mr. Sayers, the GDI has broadened its definition of how it categorises “disinformation,” which was originally defined as “deliberately false content designed to deceive” to now include “an adversarial narrative.”
This means that information that may be factually accurate but challenges the official narrative—such as scientists speaking out against the COVID-19 response or raising concerns about vaccine damage—can get a publisher placed on the GDI list and so starved of advertising revenue.
The GDI’s website lists the “Wuhan lab conspiracy theory” as one such narrative that could get a company blacklisted, even though this has been widely accepted as a legitimate, if unproven, theory on the origins of the disease and discussed in several parliaments across the world.
Another example of an “adversarial narrative” is the Jan. 6 Capitol breach, in which former President Donald Trump supporters marched into the Capital Building in Washington, D.C.
“Anything that might undermine global response to climate change” is another such forbidden narrative.
‘Controlling the Media Conversation’
In an article for UnHerd, Mr. Sayers explains that “ratings agencies” such as the GDI are “a little-understood mechanism for controlling the media conversation.”“In UnHerd’s case, the GDI verdict means that we only received between 2 percent and 6 percent of the ad revenue normally expected for an audience of our size. Meanwhile, neatly demonstrating the arbitrariness and subjectivity of these judgements, Newsguard, a rival ratings agency, gives UnHerd a 92.5 percent trust rating, just ahead of the New York Times at 87.6 percent,” he wrote.
Grapeshot, the intermediary tech company, was founded in the UK in 2006 and has since been acquired by Larry Ellison’s Oracle to automatically select appropriate websites for particular campaigns.
Mr. Sayers noted that the use of the word “disinformation” became far more prominent in the world’s media after the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, with President Trump regularly accusing news outlets of “fake news,” while he himself was often accused of being responsible for “disinformation” in return.
In the United States, some websites are now taking legal action to challenge the ratings they have been given.
Appearing this week at the House of Lords Communication and Digital Committee, Mr. Sayers said he believed the activities of the GDI were merely “the tip of the iceberg” in terms of the suppression of free speech and the plurality of media.
He wrote that, in his view, campaigners such as Ms. Melford are “lending legitimacy to a conspiratorial world view in which governments and corporations are in cahoots to censor political expression.”
“Unless something is done to stop them, they will continue to sow paranoia and distrust — and hasten us towards an increasingly radicalised and divided society.”
