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

[OvaHere]

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.

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

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

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.

Yeah me too! Unfortunately men don't agree

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.

Content, not contact!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Just to add - imagine how this could be abused. Take a big ad funded news site and now imagine they are told that if they run stories on a certain topic it will be branded as disinformation and they risk being placed on the "exclusion list". This will result in the loss of 90+% of their revenue overnight. Now remember the GDI is largely government funded. So you potentially have a way for government to block the publishing of "adversarial narratives" online. I'm amazed that people can't see the issue here.

Quite. It's far from a 'non story'.

They are a small non-profit and are primarily funded by governments and donors
No they aren't. Their accounts are open on their website. Most of their revenue comes from their commercial customers. This is something you are saying to make them look like a shady QUANGO, rather than am actual fact.

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.
This is true. My argument is its a consequence of the deregulated free market on the Internet. Ironically just the kind of environment the right wing want.

If Unherd want a business model where their revenues come from advertising, then the advertisers are their customers and they need to host content that is compatible with the advertisers policies.

If freedom of speech and providing "the truth" to consumers is more important then they need a different business model. Probably a pay wall type model like most online media these days.

I think the way it works is, TRSOH have declared it to be a non-story, and therefore anybody who disagrees that it is a non-story are "adversarially" committing "disinformation" and deserve to have "consequences."

There was a post on the Mumsnet Corpus thread (I think it was posted about 21.00 on Friday), it was a link something but there was a bit copied into the post. How someone called Nathan justified good people doing bad stuff to people. In the context of undercover policeman and the like. I understood it as good people can do bad stuff to bad people because they are bad. If they weren't bad we wouldn't have to do this bad stuff to them. Nathan, with this thinking, piles all the moral responsibility for the bad stuff onto the people identified as bad. They carry the can, not only for their own crimes but also, for the crimes committed by the 'good' guys in order to catch/stop them.

I suspect this thinking underlined the relationships struck up by undercover cops in order to infiltrate organisations they'd identified as 'bad'. The women, who had committed no crimes, were victims (in the cops minds) of the bad orgs that needed investigating and the coppers wanted someone to fuck.

There's a phrase 'who watches the watchmen'. Definitely applies here. GDI have set themselves up, as the arbiters of what is and isn't acceptable for public discourse. No debate.

I'm a believer in sunlight. Have the debates out in the open, let truth out.

Driving stuff underground doesn't kill it, it just entrenches it, arguably makes it more extreme.

The GDI isn't largely government funded.

In print/TV media ofcom and ipso have the ability to impose financial penalties/shut down organisations. In fact this week Ofcom have warned GB News to behave before the GE (another Marshall outlet).

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68887823.amp

Again, if advertisers don't want their content associated with certain kinda of news, that is their choice. They wouldn't use GDI if it had no benefits for them.

There is no such thing as the right side of history and by writing off my points like that you just make yourself look very blinkered.

OK sure.

Blinkered, but presumably this is the wrong kind of blinkered.

Because if I was being blinkered by GDI deliberately blocking "adversarial misinformation" in favour of "TRUTH AND GOODNESS" then that would be nothing-to-see-here non-story blinkering.

The GDI isn't largely government funded

Ok I think the difference is our numbers is I was just looking a the UK. They received over £600K from the UK government in the last year and are an 8 person team which would suggest to me a substantial proportion of their income is from government.

Their accounts are open on their website. Most of their revenue comes from their commercial customers.

Can you post a link to these accounts? I can't find them on their website. I've only managed to find their UK accounts on the companies house site.

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/11297397/filing-history

The government funding doesn't seem to show at all in these accounts, as far as I can tell. They received nearly £2m from the UK government between 2019 and 2022 which doesn't appear to be shown in their accounts.

On this page they have some information about their funding, but who funds them, and how much they receive from different sources is unclear.

https://www.disinformationindex.org/about

This is the graphic they use to show funding sources. Does 'Income (Count) by Type' mean that each source of income, whether a government department or a commercial company, is one (count), regardless of the amount paid?

I think it's also obvious that people having been told by an organisation that they've paid a large sum of money to that Unherd is bad, they're going to believe them. Partly confirmation bias, also because money and vanity. How much of an idiot does it make you to pay to get bad advice!.

It seem though that the customers don't even see who they are blacklisting, they just take GDI's word for it. They've completely outsourced their thinking. Ffs, a Conservative government is paying to blacklist Conservative news sites!

I was on the Guardian yesterday for a recipe. Their begging banner came up, the scary one about being censored by the right-wing 😃

You get upset about people 'writing off your posts'.

Imagine if a few people who were unelected were [being paid by the government and] able to just hide your posts without your knowledge or say so, and you had no way of finding out why. I imagine you'd have quite the tantrum and want to know what was going on.