Worth watching - Unherd investigation - Inside the 'disinformation' industry. Kathleen Stock specifically mentioned.

Sure. Where else do advertisers get the service they pay for then?
It's a free market. GDI provide a service, the advertisers pay. There is no way to regulate GDI, is my point.

I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding in this thread about who GDI are and how they're funded. They are a small non-profit and are primarily funded by governments and donors. They provide an "exclusion list" to online ad platforms who then use this to block ads from appearing on certain sites. They don't operate like a normal commercial company with a product and customer base.

There's also a misunderstanding about how online advertising works. It's not 1999. Online advertising is funneled through a small number of ad platforms which have algorithms to determine where to place content. This is why GDI were able to reduce Unherd's online ad revenues by an estimated 95% simply by putting them on their "exclusion list".

This is an enormous amount of power to hand over to an 8 person team who most people didn't even know existed until a few days ago. The fact that they are not (yet) being held to account for e.g. the Kathleen Stock example shows the obvious issue here.

There is no way to regulate GDI

They are funded by the government. Surely there should be some regulation.

https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2023-02-21/149420

What is discriminatory about saying that people who have been harmed by the medical profession should have recourse to legal action against them?

Sure. Where else do advertisers get the service they pay for then?
It's a free market. GDI provide a service, the advertisers pay. There is no way to regulate GDI, is my point.

And in the case of the OP, its actually Oracle that have restricted advertising on the site, using GDI as one source of data.

No. The point is Amazon have policies: “Our support for the LGBTQ+ community is a core pillar of our commitment to representing and celebrating diversity, equity and inclusion across Amazon" “You will not place our Ads adjacent to any content that promotes
or contains content or activity that is discriminatory.""

They are giving examples of where the adverts have been placed in a context that breaks Amazons policy.

It's interesting that GDI believes that defunding adversarial narratives reduces conspiracy theories. I've found that there's nothing quite as likely to push a person towards conspiracy than seeing something they know to be true suppressed. A media that is only promoting an approved narrative will result in people seeking out other sources.

I’ve read the report.

The first example has a headline that says: “Make it easy to sue over gender transition procedures” and this comment “If democrats truly supported gender-confused children, they’d support our effort to give them legal recourse”.

The implication is that the virtuous /non-phobic opinion to hold is one that customers of gender affirming surgeries should continue not to have legal recourse to sue.

That’s how off the wall this is. Why is giving people the right to sue for botched surgery Transphobia?

Content, not contact!

Adam

Advertisers want a service - how to prevent their brands being associated with disinformation. GDI provide the service.

No they do not, they provide a dishonest service, which falsely labels factually correct contact - which they don't like - as disinformation. They're not getting what they think they are paying for, they're getting propaganda and lies.

I honestly don't know how you can continue to asset that GDI provide a service to inform about disinformation, when they are propagating disinformation themselves.

Yeah me too! Unfortunately men don't agree

I did read the report, hoping that it would expand on the webpage and provide greater information and some numbers. Instead I got 8 screenshots tying advertisers to adversarial narrative conflict with a Paint textbox telling me what was wrong with the content. Hardly compelling and wrong on at least one of the screenshots.

2/10 for effort.

I personally would like Pornhub and their business model to burn in the fiery pits of hell.

Thanks for the thread ova because I did not know about this org and it is fascinating

You should download the report and have a look. It has examples of the content it's talking about and how it conflicts with the host organisations policy on adverts. It's not them putting a particular value judgement on it.

Government pay them for services too. Government pay lots of suppliers, many I don't like (the owners of Bibby Stockholm for example. Frank Hester. Michelle Mone). That's life.

No. It isn't.
It's simple free market. Advertisers want a service - how to prevent their brands being associated with disinformation. GDI provide the service.
Other providers could and probably do exist.

Sayers is whining because he doesn't like it. Tough. It's a free market, he needs another revenue stream.

Who would pay for that Alison and how do you expect it to impact pornhubs business model?

This is one of those irregular thingummies again.

My boot is transparently on your neck.

No-one else clearly has a boot on your neck, but I suggest that maybe they do, and they're not transparent about it. Which is quite sinister.

Therefore they're actually worse than my boot on your neck, because at least I'm doing it publicly. You should be grateful for how clearly I'm using my power.

Unlike those shady people over there - who knows what they're up to? I don't trust them. I trust my boot. (Which was properly paid for, so it's all above board).

It's nothing to do with "their politics mostly chiming with mine". It's to do with this is a service that someone will provide on a deregulated, capital Internet. I don't understand what people who are against GDI expect to happen.

How about the disinformation of:

'that girl is not consenting to that sex'
'that girl is not over 18'
'that man is not a lesbian'?

No, let's all focus on the disinformation of...whatever it is that they think Kathleen Stock said that is probably 100% factually true.

Totally rational behaviour.

I took a little wander around the GDI website and tripped over this.

Why is anti-LGBTQ+ disinformation being funded by advertising?

www.disinformationindex.org/disinfo-ads/2022-08-02-why-is-anti-lgbtq-disinformation-being-funded-by-advertising/

It throws some light on GDI's use of adversarial narrative conflict in general and in the LGBTQ+ arena in particular. I found the examples of adversarial narrative conflict themes of particular interest:

*Educating children about gender identity is child abuse and/or sexual grooming.

Books in schools that depict sexual content, pornography or pedophilia are somehow representative of LGBTQ+ persons.

Gender nonconformity is against nature and similar to “satanic ritual abuse.”

"Transgenderism" is a "concept" invented and imposed on children by the "Radical Left” intended to destroy the social fabric of society.

Increasing numbers of young people who identify as transgender is proof that identifying as such is a social choice rather than a naturally occurring state.*

I would agree that all these points are disinformation if presented as statements of fact but how close to each of these themes do you need to be to be guilty of adversarial narrative conflict? How about:

Teaching gender identity as uncontested fact should be banned in schools.

There is no place in schools for books that depict sexual content, pornography or pedophilia.

Social transition is not a neutral act.

Transgenderism is a recent concept without any commonly agreed meaning.

The recent sudden increase in children who identify as transgender suggests that this is not a naturally occurring state and needs proper investigation.

There is no commentary on this apart from him and various right wing sources amplifying his message.

As I say, Stock isn't the person affected here. Sayers/Unherd is. And I think its a non-story - sorry.

It is very interesting about the Internet and how it should be policed though.