Democracy Dies in Darkness? A new memo from the taxpayer-funded National Endowment for Democracy shows grantee Global Disinformation Index viewed silencing Trump and toxifying certain news outlets to reduce their revenues as a win. The policy spread to other federal programs.
A nonprofit that received federal funding to develop censorship strategies boasted in progress reports to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) that early tactics had suppressed the reach of Donald Trump’s messaging and reduced advertising by $100 million to news outlets it deemed to be “disinformation” spreaders, according to newly disclosed memos.
The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) was awarded grants through its U.S.-based affiliate, AN Foundation, from NED, a congressionally chartered and taxpayer-funded agency in Washington. The grants were paid to develop strategies on how to fight perceived disinformation in foreign countries.
But GDI’s quarterly progress reports often explicitly boasted about the impact of censorship efforts on American targets and audiences.
For instance, it touted to the NED that it had created a report called “Bankrolling Bigotry: An Overview of the Online Funding Strategies of American Hate Groups” that relied heavily on research from the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center to warn that “hatred is surging across the United States, threatening the safety, security and wellbeing of minority communities.”
You can read that report here:
Demonetization: Trying to bankrupt news outlets
Similarly, it boasted about its recommended tactics. Specifically, urging advertisers to choke revenue to news outlets that the index deemed to spread disinformation had an enormous early impact, it wrote.
“This period, we turned our minds to evaluation of GDI’s impact; specifically, to how we might measure the demonetization achieved through uptake of our risk ratings by brands and/or ad tech platforms,” GDI wrote. Demonetization refers to the practice of pressuring advertisers and gaming search engines in order to reduce, or even remove, earnings from YouTube and other social media platforms relied upon by publishers.
Partnering with a “trusted ad tech analytics organization,” GDI estimated that during a 15-month period, from March 2020 to September 2021, the number of bids sent to the approximately 1,200 sites listed on its “Dynamic Exclusion List” was halved, leading to an estimated $100 million lost in collective revenue, the memo says.
You can read GDI’s grant agreement with NED and quarterly narrative reports below:
GDI’s own index identified 10 American news media outlets as superspreaders of disinformation, almost all of them conservative voices, like The New York Post, The Daily Wire, Newsmax, The Federalist, and The Blaze, among others. The memos mentioned that, combined, the outlets identified by the index lost advertising, but did not identify them by name.
Michael Chamberlain, head of the nonprofit watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust, which obtained the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, said the memos proved that while NED’s effort was billed as targeting overseas propaganda, it ended up routinely focusing on suppressing American speech, mostly right-leaning or conservative in nature.
“The Censorship Industrial Complex was hard at work early in this decade, and they were using taxpayer dollars to do so,” Chamberlain told Just the News in an interview. “They effectively gave funding to GDI to look at disinformation, misinformation in foreign countries, such as countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America—Nigeria, India, Malaysia, Mexico are mentioned specifically in the grant application.”
Selectively suppressing political speech
Perhaps its most stark admission came when it cited a New York Times article on how the censorship industry’s effort to shut down Trump’s social media presence had undercut the former and future president’s reach and amplification. GDI bragged in the progress report about the “wider context” of its work that included research on Donald Trump’s social media reach after he was deplatformed by most U.S. social media apps in the wake of Jan. 6 and his departure from office.
“Our press coverage during the quarter included a front-page article in The New York Times citing GDI research on the dramatic drop in reach of Trump’s statements once the bullhorn of the social media algorithms was removed,” the group touted.
Mike Benz, the founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online and a major anti-censorship activist, said the documents were stunning and disturbing.
“I am absolutely disgusted by these revelations, as should be every American and every world citizen to see the US government, under the Biden administration, actively funding a full-out campaign to pressure advertisers to defund private independent news sites who competed with the Biden State Department’s media narratives,” Benz told Just the News.
“Everyone involved in this should be fired, and frankly, NED itself must be defunded,” he added.