This is part of a Washington Examiner series on self-styled “disinformation” tracking groups that are blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media.
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A State Department-backed “disinformation” tracking group blacklisting conservative news outlets pressured advertising companies to punish websites boosting the COVID-19 “lab leak” theory, which a federal agency now says is the most likely origin of the virus.
The Global Disinformation Index, a British group with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit organizations, has continued to come under fire for feeding conservative news blacklists to advertising companies. This same government-funded entity repeatedly applied pressure on companies to cut ties with websites promoting the once alleged right-wing “conspiracy” that COVID-19 emerged from a lab — which the Energy Department recently concluded is probable based on intelligence.
“GDI is part of [a] disturbing constellation of pop-up censorship organizations that all descended on stifling COVID origins discourse online simultaneously,” Mike Benz, a former State Department official and director of Foundation For Freedom Online, a censorship watchdog, told the Washington Examiner.
A Sunday report by the Wall Street Journal revealed that the Energy Department has determined that a lab leak is the most likely culprit for the spread of COVID-19. In 2021, the FBI said with “moderate confidence” that a lab leak is likely the cause of the pandemic, while the CIA and another agency haven’t reached a conclusion.
GDI, which compiles a “dynamic exclusion list” intended for brands to target conservative websites like the Washington Examiner, has published several reports on alleged COVID-19 disinformation. The group notably received $665,000 combined between 2020 and 2021 from the State Department-backed Global Engagement Center and National Endowment for Democracy
, a nonprofit group that has said it will no longer fund GDI.
GDI alleged in a February 2020 report dubbed “Coronavirus: The makings of a disinformation pandemic?” that “adversarial narratives” are emerging as a key “disinformation tactic.” The report called out Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) for raising the possibility on Fox News that COVID-19 came from a lab.
“By broadcasting the Senator’s words to a national audience, this debunked conspiracy theory is given authority, validation and amplification,” said GDI in the report.
One month later, in March 2020, GDI released a report titled, “Why is Ad Tech Funding These Ads on Coronavirus Conspiracy Sites?”
The report, which slammed Google and other companies for “providing ad revenue streams to known disinformation sites peddling coronavirus conspiracies,” called out the conservative blog American Thinker for publishing a commentary article titled “The Wuhan Virus Escaped From a Chinese Lab.” GDI also took aim at a company selling N-95 masks for advertising in the article.
Screenshot/GDI report
GDI also took aim in April 2020 at former President Donald Trump for announcing a government investigation into the lab leak theory. The organization claimed that Trump’s move “triggered a second wave of conspiracy lab theories on known disinformation sites” and slammed companies for advertising in an article in Canada Free Press that discussed the theory.
“All these lab conspiracy theories have been fact checked and proven untrue,” said GDI in the report, linking to an article casting doubt on the lab leak theory. “The BBC recently debunked evidence of the Wuhan lab conspiracy by breaking down the timeline of events, the protocols in place to protect researchers and civilians from pathogens, and evaluations of [the] lab in Wuhan by U.S. officials.”
GDI added: “As GDI consistently has argued, disinformation spreads across networks and starts out on the fringe, before moving into the mainstream. The case of the Wuhan lab conspiracy clearly shows this phenomenon.”
The same month that GDI released this report, the group’s co-founder, Danny Rogers, appeared in an interview with GZERO Media. He alleged that “people are weaponizing conspiracy around” COVID-19 and “where it emerged,” pointing to the March 2020 American Thinker article.
Rogers isn’t the only individual linked to GDI that dismissed the lab leak theory. So did Anne Applebaum, a liberal journalist on the group’s advisory panel, which oversees the crafting of the dynamic exclusion list.
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“Wow,” Applebaum said in February 2020 in reaction to Cotton exploring the lab leak theory on Fox News. “Just like the Soviet propagandists who tried to convince the world that the CIA invented AIDS.”
GDI did not return a request for comment.
