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

Yes and no. Some advertising and you can bet that's because those advertisers know it's going to find their target market of men who want a lot. (E.g. cam sites, paid for porn, only fans).
And some funnelling to paid content and subscriptions.

The advertisers don't care because they want the £££ from paid abuse of women. And seemingly there is nothing governments can do because "free speech", "can't police the internet".

To be honest I'd much rather see a focus on shutting that down than shutting down GDI. But it's all about priorities I guess.

I wonder how free to access Pornhub makes money?

Would it be through ADVERTISING?

They are clear about their funding

https://www.disinformationindex.org/about

Well that's exactly the point about the Internet.
Pornhub generates money. Consumers pay for porn. Its £££. Therefore no incentive to police it in a deregulated, capitalist Internet.

Advertisers don't want the hit to their bottom line of their brand being associated with disinformation or certain political views. Therefore there is £££ in making sure they can avoid that. Hence GDI.

If advertisers knew Unherd was attracting a good target market for their products they'd still advertise there regardless of what GDI say. That index will be just one source of information they are using.

I don't think he made it up, I think he probably selectively quoted from a range and picked the most sympathetic example to stir up outrage. Most people who follow the debate will be aware of what happened to Stock and so will automatically think GDI are wrong.

It reminds me of Farage's outrage about being "debanked". Selective quoting to push a point about the right being discriminated against and censored, causing moral outrage about threats to free speech.

When investigated, the reality was something very different.

www.google.com/amp/s/news.sky.com/story/amp/farage-debanking-row-natwest-review-finds-no-evidence-of-widespread-political-discrimination-13030827

I'm quite suspicious of Sayers version of events. That's why I'd like to see the GDIs side - to get a more balanced view.

AdamRyan · Today 15:57

There is no evidence they are "highly partisan". In fact they say they are neutral and non-partisan.

They can say that the moon is green cheese, for all I care. They have boasted that they describe factual information they don't like as "disinformation." It defies logic to accept their word that they are non-partisan.

Their admission that they describe 100% accurate GC stuff as "disinformation" i incontrovertible proof that they are partisan.

Kathleen Stock pointing out sterilising kids is BAD.

Meanwhile Pornhub, nothing to see here. Crack on.

I mean, if they really wanted to clean up the internet, rape and trafficking under-age girls might be a good place to start I'd expect. Maybe that's just me?

Yes exactly. The GDI is another bunch of winebar authoritarians working on a censorship model. Their claim to be identifying "disinformation" is nonsense, they do no actual fact checking in any example that I've tried to check out. People are organisations are blacklisted for "wrongthink".

Many years ago the Economic League and its sibling organisations used to do the same thing. It was banned and use of its information was classified as discriminatory in terms of employment and information sharing. Its the same model of censorship but for some reason the winebar set who have appropriated much of the left seem to love and defend the GDI using all the arguments of the old Economic League.

I'm going to chip in here.

Not by commercial companies (my understanding is the GDI have subscribers), whether for profit or not, who disguise a business model as public service. GDI may believe that disinformation exists because powerful vested interests generate it for nefarious reasons of their own, and that the best way to counter it is to defund them by squeezing their business opportunities. However, that does not justify them calling out viewpoints without showing how those viewpoints are based in disinformation. They have not, in Stock's case, done this.

I stand by my rewriting of their mission statement.

There is no evidence they are "highly partisan". In fact they say they are neutral and non-partisan.

That is always going to be debatable because what's acceptable in one culture isn't in another, but I see no reason to think they are "highly partisan". They are a lot more transparent than some groups.

AdamRyan · Today 15:47

sinner how would you like to see the Internet policed?

I don't know much about it, but a highly partisan group shouldn't be allowed to lie about who's disseminating disinformation.

sinner how would you like to see the Internet policed? I cannot see how it works unless there is a service like this, because advertisers are always going to want to target advertising. Towards places where it is most likely to hit a target audience and away from places where there is a brand association risk.

How do you think that service could be provided better, given the nature of the Internet?

(I'm asking because you usually have interesting perspectives on this)

Maybe people need to look at their whole website. This is their mission page:

I didn't read their whole website. True. However, that changes nothing. They're still acting against the viewpoint, and not making a clear distinction between viewpoint and disinformation.

Edit: My typing is rubbish.

This is interesting:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/19/house-republicans-disinformation-global-engagement-center/

Maybe people need to look at their whole website. This is their mission page:

Yes, and the DDR was genuinely the German Democratic Republic.

AdamRyan · Today 12:27

I'm sure Paul Marshall has the ££ to sue them if he thinks they are defamatory. Would be interesting to see how that works because "the truth" is a defence against defamation.

But saying that something is factually correct, but because they don't like it, they've called it disinformation wouldn't pass the truth test, as it's an obvious lie.

Maybe people need to look at their whole website. This is their mission page:

https://www.disinformationindex.org/mission

Defunding Disinformation
Malicious actors peddle disinformation for myriad reasons. They may be highly organised nation states motivated by geopolitical aims, private marketing companies acting on behalf of political or commercial organisations, or ad hoc communities of like-minded individuals motivated by a shared ideology. But GDI’s founding thesis is that the majority of disinformation on the web is motivated by financial gain, the result of the dominant attention-driven business models that drive today’s internet.
This is where GDI focuses its efforts. To reduce disinformation, we need to remove the financial incentive to create it. Brands unwittingly provide an estimated quarter of a billion dollars annually to disinformation websites through online advertisements placed on them. GDI uses both expert human review and artificial intelligence to assess disinformation risk across the open web. We then provide these risk ratings to brands and advertising technology partners, providing them with a trusted and neutral source of data with which to direct their advertising spend.

GDI's statement according to the Press Gazette says:

GDI said in a statement: “GDI is a non-profit that brings transparency to digital advertising. We provide risk assessments of online news to the advertising industry, which uses this data to make more informed choices over the advertising they buy online. Fully informed transactions between buyers and sellers are a key tenet of a free market.”

This is not the same as this:

GDI provides independent, neutral and transparent data and intelligence to advise policymakers and business leaders about how to combat disinformation and its creators

It looks like it needs to reword its mission statement. Perhaps:

GDI provides independent and transparent data and intelligence to advise policymakers and business leaders about how to avoid pile-ons.

Yes. I think GDI "risk assess" websites for the threat they contain disinformation to make an index. Advertising authorities then use that index as one factor in choosing where to place their adverts.

So in this case Oracle used the data to route adverts.

I have no idea about the veracity of what Sayers is alleging. Like you say, it's a "snippet". I am interested in how you propose it's dealt with. The Internet is effectively unregulated so if the advertisers want to pay for this service, that's up to them. And if the websites want to use advertising as their revenue stream, they have to produce content that keeps the advertisers (who are the customers) happy. The readers/"freedom of speech" are kind of irrelevant.

Like I say, this is an outcome of unregulated capitalism.

I am not sure if they did or if that's just what Sayers chose to take from a bigger set of examples. That's why I'd like to hear more about their side.

The fact is though that the Internet is not policed and can be manipulated for all sorts of agendas. GDI are very transparent about who they are and what they do. There will be others that are not so transparent.

@AdamRyan
I think that is what they do.

So it's "Oracle" which has added the judgment of "disinformation"? GDI don't claim to be doing this? That would seem to be the Press Gazette's view. But GDI's homepage gives a mission statement:

GDI provides independent, neutral and transparent data and intelligence to advise policymakers and business leaders about how to combat disinformation and its creators.

The snippet quoted by OP is most decidedly not this. It is criticising Unherd for their viewpoint, not the factual accuracy of their writing.

If GDI were open and honest and said "If you sign up with us, we'll tell you which sites are not in accord with views you want to be associated with so you can avoid advertising there" I would have no problem with it.

I think that is what they do. From the Press Gazette article:

Eventually, advertising agency Teads revealed that Unherd was being flagged as disinformation by advertising software company Oracle which uses data from GDI.

GDI said in a statement: “GDI is a non-profit that brings transparency to digital advertising. We provide risk assessments of online news to the advertising industry, which uses this data to make more informed choices over the advertising they buy online. Fully informed transactions between buyers and sellers are a key tenet of a free market.”