Don’t worry, fellow Americans! The US government would never directly interfere with your First Amendment rights, and certainly not to favor one side of our political debates. But Uncle Sam will happily contract those jobs out to creepy left-wing “disinformation”-fighting firms — and use your tax dollars to do it.
Take the case of the Global Disinformation Index (early front-runner for this year’s Most Orwellian Name), unearthed by the Washington Examiner. The UK-based GDI takes money from the US government, i.e. your money, and uses it to buildup blacklists of wrongthinkers.
Then they push for advertisers to boycott these sites, trying to drive them out of business.
GDI works hand-in-glove with other shops in the same nightmare industry, like Integral Ad Science, a firm that uses AI to police journalism. Through IAS, GDI is linked to DoubleVerify, a publicly traded company which operates an “inflammatory news index”— the names on it kept secret in the best totalitarian tradition.
The outfits getting blacklisted? Libertarian flagship Reason, right-of-center The Daily Wire and even aggregators like RealClearPolitics.The outlets it labels less risky — NPR, BuzzFeed, the AP, The New York Times and the like — are all those that happily parrot whatever actual disinfo comes from the White House or other corridors of power, up to and including the 100% fake Steele Dossier.
The Post is proud to note we too made GDI’s top-10 “riskiest” list. Is it because we dared to go after Hunter Biden? Our science-based dissent from COVID madness? Who knows! These days, anything that discomfits powerful Democrats gets labeled as disinfo.
It’s time to end the word games around this issue. What GDI and other similar outfits are doing is censorship, pure and simple: getting paid to quash views and news the left doesn’t like. It’s beyond disturbing that it’s happening at all. That taxpayers are stuck with the bill for any of it is obscene.
Here’s hoping Rep. Jim Comer’s Oversight Committee sees this glaring target and takes swift, harsh action.