Who Is Censoring What?
Plurality which is not reduced to unity is confusion; unity which does not depend on plurality is tyranny.
- Thomas Hobbes
Welcome to the disinformation age, where no one is allowed to know anything unless they bend their knee to the spirit of the age. One site will proclaim that Trump is the second coming of Christ, and another will tout his reincarnation as Hitler. How is this possible, and, more importantly, who decides what is and isn’t disinformation?
The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), founded in the UK in 2018 and funded by the United States State Department, is one of the key players in the disinformation landscape. The site explains that:
Solution: Write to inform TE or Disinfo Cloud what your office needs to counter propaganda and disinformation. Ask us for assistance in identifying a technological solution or draft a test proposal for a tool. Can’t find a tool that fits your needs? Let Disinfo Cloud know by using the blue and green feedback buttons. The team is open to insights and is here to help implement ideas to move the counter propaganda and disinformation mission forward.
The GTI index is utilized by a dozen interagency groups within the United States, including the Census Bureau, U.S. Congress, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Office of Global Affairs, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Treasury Department, U.S. Agency for Global Media, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, plays a significant role in countering disinformation.
Four foreign governments —the Australian Government, the Estonian Government, the European Union, and the United Kingdom Government—are also involved in the GTI index.
In toto, the GTI index collaborates 32 governments into a system that monitors and determines what is and is not disinformation. The American interagencies are touted on the website, but if there are 31 other countries involved, how many different agencies are involved?
While we may never know how many agencies are involved, we can look at the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) founders and get a decent comparison with the GTI index. One founder’s name is Clare Melford, who infamously stated:
“A lot of disinformation is not just whether something is true or false — it escapes from the limits of fact-checking. Something can be factually accurate but still extremely harmful… [GDI] leads you to a more useful definition of disinformation… It’s not saying something is or is not disinformation, but it is saying that content on this site or this particular article is content that is anti-immigrant, content that is anti-women, content that is antisemitic…”
When speaking about traffic content using AI, Melford explained:
“We actually instantiate our definition of disinformation — the adversarial narrative topics — within the technology,” explains Melford. “Each adversarial narrative is given its own machine-learning classifier, which then allows us to search for content that matches that narrative at scale… misogyny, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-black content, climate change denial, etc.”
The other founder is Daniel Rogers, who worked in the US intelligence community before founding Terbium Labs. Terbium Labs used AI and machine learning to scour the internet for illicit use of sensitive data and then sold it to Deloitte.
Even if the GDI was altruistic in their “fact-checking,” they seem lacking on their website. For example, the GDI still has a blog post claiming that COVID-19 did not come from a lab in Wuhan, including dozens of news sources that attempt to bolster this claim, concluding that “cutting off ads to these fringe sites and their outer networks is the first action needed.” This is still the case four years after Facebook corrected its policy on the same topic. If it is taken down, here is a PDF of the post.
On top of it all, GDI lists the most helpful and harmful groups on disinformation by news sight. As expected, all “approved” news outlets were center-left at the very least with their outlet’s political leanings, while any to the right of NPR were deemed “partisan”:
I could go on ad nausiam about how dangerous these “disinformation” groups are for free speech, including that on their own website:
GDI has never worked with—and will never work with— any government to conduct research into that government’s own country.
That is a respectable take until one considers that two-thirds of the funding of GDI is commercial.
This leads to the ultimate question: who determines what is and isn’t disinformation? Is it the government, or is it the oligarchy of business interests?