Elon Musk Calls For Disinformation Non-Profit To Be ‘Shut Down’ After Editor Protests Site’s Blacklisting

Elon Musk accused the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) of itself pushing “disinformation” and called for it to “be shutdown” after the organisation blacklisted British news and opinion outlet Unherd.

UnHerd was slapped with a boycott by numerous online advertisers after UK-based non-profit GDI labelled some of its articles as “anti-trans narratives” and gave it a low “brand-safety” rating. GDI’s objective is to guide advertisers away from what it deems “harmful content.”

In a video outlining UnHerd’s investigation of GDI and its influence on advertisers, CEO and editor-in-chief Freddie Sayers explained how the problem surfaced when advertising agencies were left confused by the low return being made given audience numbers. The final agency then discovered that the site had been flagged as disinformation by Oracle, a product strategy software firm, on the basis of data from GDI.

The publication had been given a low score by GDI for articles challenging transgender self-identification and sex-change surgeries.

Unherd’s mission statement says that the publication has “no allegiance to any political party or tradition” nor is it interested in “contrarianism” but that it’s aim is “to challenge lazy consensus” and seek out the “broader wisdom of history, philosophy, science and religious thought” from sidelined thinkers.

“You have a weird scenario,” he said, “where a self-appointed organisation is deciding that a explicitly legal and majority held view is enough to get an entire website blocked from international ad exchanges.”

Critically examining the emergence of non-profit’s like GDI, Sayers said: “Under the umbrella term of disinformation, there’s been this huge blossoming of not-for-profits, companies and indeed government agencies that can take very politicised views on things without proper accountability.”

He continued: “The other way of looking at it is that establishment voices being challenged during [events like Brexit, President Donald Trump’s election and COVID pandemic] by opinions that they didn’t hold, and yet lots of people outside the beltway did hold, had to come up with new measures to outlaw them, to deem other opinions as somehow unacceptable.

Sayers added: “[Disinformation flagging is] a way of moving what should be a political conversation into the realm of expertise and saying, ‘No, there is an official truth here. And if you don’t agree with it, you are dangerous, you’re irresponsible, your voice shouldn’t be heard.’”

In his investigation, Sayers looked at GDI’s history and founder, who openly tout backgrounds in the U.S. intelligence community, machine learning development and European think-tanks: “The Global Disinformation Index was founded in the UK in 2018. And its objective, as it stated at the time, was explicitly to disrupt the business model for online disinformation by starving offending publications of funding.”

Pointing to the organisation’s funding, which is partly sourced from the UK government, Sayers said that this association poses a serious threat to free speech and free debate, highlighting that without interference Unherd’s advertising revenue income would jump significantly but is being stifled by GDI’s algorithm-assisted rating system.

Subtweeting UnHerd’s investigation, Musk weighed in:

Meanwhile, GDI defends its practices as necessary for combating misinformation online.