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

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Freddie Sayers recently attended a government special committee about News where he raised problems Unherd have had with ad revenue and ad agencies.

It turns out Unherd have been placed on an exclusion list by a British company called the Global Disinformation Index. This company is funded in part by money from various global government departments including our FCDO.

After finding this out Unherd appealed and asked the GDI for an explanation. After some weeks they got a response that rejected the appeal and were told it was because they hosted gender critical content and specifically named Kathleen Stock and her objections to the reform of the GRA 2004.

Our team re-reviewed the domain, the rating will not change as it continues to have anti LGBTQI+ narratives... The site authors have also been called out for being anti -trans. Kathleen Stock is acknowledged as a "prominent gender- critical" feminist. She has opposed transgender self identification in regards to proposed reforms in the 2004 UK Gender Recognition Act.

It's not clear if this is the entirety of the GDI response to Unherd however they are clear that they consider Professor Stock's views 'disinformation'. If you watch the video you'll discover the GDI have conveniently broadened the definition of disinformation beyond just that which is false or factually incorrect.

Unsurprisingly they don't apply this to discourse their founders like and agree with.

Yikes. worth watching, thanks.

Basically what happens when you have forced, centralised opinion.

A lesson never to read from just one news source.

genuinely great video - really worth watching

I wonder if there's any way to force them to reveal their judgements and the criteria upon which they based them? And to challenge them and have them remove a diktat?

It's chilling to think that, in the wake of Maya Forstater's and other recent cases, that governments are funding this sinister cabal.

Great video - this is so worrying. Why are we allowing companies like the GDI to determine what we watch/ listen to? They get to decide what 'disinformation' is - very telling also that the main reason Unherd got hand slapped is because of gender critical feminists.

We are of course the scariest people on earth and need to be shut up at all costs.

The most dangerous thing in the world, a strong woman with an opinion!

Runs screaming to the hills...

I suspect they would frame it not as deciding what people can read/watch/listen to but as protecting advertisers from reputational damage.

Really though this is sleight of hand tactics because the advertisers will rarely question who is on the exclusion list and why and the financial implications for any media that stay afloat because of ad revenue are obvious.

So it becomes targeted censorship with a layer of plausible deniability e.g the GDI are not explicitly telling people to stop or preventing people reading a publication like UnHerd. However wouldn't it be a shame if UnHerd ceased to exist because they have no income (to be read in Mafioso voice)!

And yet when people start their own stuff and try not to rely on advertising, they get called grifters.

It struck me reading that bit by Matthew Good win above, that this may explain to some extent there seems to be an increasing gulf between men and women in terms of politics.

Increasingly women are dominating universities, and men are not attending. The statistics on this are clear, and I see it around me too, including with my own kids - two girls at university and a boy entering the trades.

If university education is where a lot of this indoctrination is happening, and where the social connections are coming from, if more girls are attending we will see more of them espousing this worldview.

The more and more these virtuous moral arbiters try and rule over us the more fucking rageful and vengeful I get.

Who the fuck do they think they are?

In the words of Withnail and I, they can fuck off and shove it up their arse.

Is that the irregular verb theory in action? (Open to suggestions.)

I am firm, you are stubborn, he/she is a pig-headed, rigid, anally retentive stick-in-the mud. (Blue Genes, Val McDermid)

I stand in the proud historic tradition of having patrons, personal subscriptions and non-directed funding from learned societies and funding award panels to support my production of works of art, profound thought, and civic participation in society.

You are a producer of work who is scraping by, constantly attempting to justify your existence and on an anti-hedonic treadmill of constant report writing and funding applications.

He/she is a grifter, abusing the limited resources of the vulnerable and gullible.

Just watched the video. The idea that we still live in a democracy is becoming more untenable by the minute.

How on earth can we get a grip on this?

I don't wholly agree with this Chris Williamson and Gurwinder Bhogal discussion (mostly because their grasp of history of media and comms is incorrect but that's also because they're younger than I am) but find it thought provoking about reporting, censorship, and media. One of the reasons that I disagree is that it's proved trivially easy to restrict Unherd, unseen until Unherd forced it into the light and there's no mechanism of appeal. Sayers' experience is a showcase for how the levers of indirect censorship are very powerful.

So censorship would have worked very well 100 years ago when there was a centralized authority which passed information down to everybody, whether it was via printed leaflets or television screens. Information was very central. It was very centralized. But that system no longer works because the reason it worked in the past was because since the authorities provided a single system of information. For instance, think about the TV. In the UK, the TV tended to only have four channels originally when I was very young. Those four channels all tended to have the same narrative. If you wanted to censor certain information, You could just basically pass a law because this was broadcast media, so they were beholden to government interventions. You could pass a law saying that the four channels are not allowed to talk about this. Therefore, now, none of that information is going to get beamed into people's homes.
[00:39:16]Now, nobody can ever know what that information was. But that centralized information structure no longer exists. All information in the West, at least, is decentralized. Or it's decentralisable in the sense that somebody can pick up on anything now and make it go viral. Now, censorship doesn't work. Now, what happens is people are well aware of what's being censored.…Streisand effect…All it takes is just one person to spill the beans, and then that's going go viral. Everybody's going to find out about it.
[00:40:31]…As soon as one organization tries to censor something, other individuals will immediately raise the alarm. As soon as that happens, everybody now wants to know what that thing was censored. They want to know why it was withheld from them. This is this thing called reactance, sometimes called the backfire effect, where when you withhold, when you say people can't have something, they become even more adamant that they want it. They want it even more. This leads to essentially a backfire. That's what it's called, the backfire effect. What happens is that people will then decide that, hang on a second, if this is being withheld from me, then it's going to obviously... I'm going a little bit, I'm veering off a little bit from the original thing. That's one aspect of it. But another aspect of this whole censorship thing is that when people realize that they can't say certain things, they instead will lie, and they're not going to change their beliefs.
[00:41:58]Like I said, the backfire effect means that people don't become... If you censor people, they're not going to become less likely to believe that thing. They're going to become more likely to believe that thing. The only thing that's going to change is that if they know that they're going to get banned for saying something, they'll just lie. But it's not going to change their thoughts. In fact, the opposite is happening. And so it's a counterproductive thing to do in the digital age. That's why censorship just doesn't work in the digital age. Because although you can control what people say online, you can't control what they think. In fact, what you do is you make people more adamant to think what they want to think.

https://www.happyscribe.com/public/modern-wisdom/742-gurwinder-bhogal-17-shocking-lessons-about-human-psychology

The should be made to list every item of 'disinformation' they believe Kathleen Stock has put on UnHerd and to provide factual corrections in each case. That will be enlightening.

It's a very clear case of "Who watches the watchmen?"

There are no appeals. How anti-democratic can a structure be? Where is the governance?

So many of these abuses and scandals have failures of governance and lack of accountability at their heart.

Every accusation is a confession as they say.

The should be made to list every item of 'disinformation' they believe Kathleen Stock has put on UnHerd and to provide factual corrections in each case. That will be enlightening.

They've got a get out for that, they have expanded the definition of "disinformation" to include "promoting an adversarial narrative" so the fact that these things are true are largely irrelevant to them.

'Promoting an adversarial narrative' is genuinely frightening

Follow up video on this story and some of the response to the expose last week. Only watched a few minutes so far but it seems it was picked up on by a number of people/orgs who have commented.

Watched in full now.

It has more footage of the Q&A with the HoL committee plus what UnHerd are planning to do next. They've created an email address specifically for anyone to submit evidence/examples of censorship via the disinformation movement globally.

I find the absolute certainty that these companies have that they are the right moral arbiter totally chilling. Where is their self doubt?

So Kathleen Stock supported the legal status quo, and they reckon that’s extremism?

Flipping heck.

When the truth is 'misinformation' we know we have a problem.

I just watched the first video expecting it to be a bit hyperbolic but then I heard the woman who runs the GDI describing disinformation as including information that is "factual but harmful". I can't believe people just sat and listened to her say that! It doesn't get more Orwellian.

Also incredible that Kathleen Stock, a lesbian philosopher and one of the most considered and reasonable voices out there, has been flagged as spreading LGBT disinformation. Insanity.

Agreed - it's so easy to dismiss this stuff as conspiracy theory but if you listen to her she is showing her agenda loud and clear. Truth is unimportant if it's seen as mean or harmful.

Unfortunately, we still have too much trust in institutions and public organisation - assuming they are doing their stated jobs to the best of their ability. But so many of these institutions/ organisations have been infiltrated by people who care more about activism than the jobs they are paid to do.

I've only had time to give this a quick look but the GDI gets a mention so i thought i'd leave it here

https://thecritic.co.uk/the-awkward-truth-about-sex-and-free-speech/