The Times Comes Out Against Internet Censorship

The Times has come out against online censorship in a leading article today, slamming ‘press ratings agencies’ like Global Disinformation Index as “self-appointed arbiters of truth” that undermine objective reporting. Here’s an excerpt.

The wilful dissemination of inaccurate news stories by hostile foreign states and grassroots conspiracy theorists poses an obvious threat to the healthy functioning of political life. But so too does the attempt to clamp down on so-called disinformation, especially when such efforts clumsily intrude on the legitimate operations of a free press. The work of the Global Disinformation ­Index (GDI), a not-for-profit ratings agency founded in the U.K. in 2018, illustrates this chilling tendency. Though the GDI presents itself as an ­institution devoted to the promotion of “neutrality, independence and transparency”, in practice it has helped to stymie valuable and independent-minded journalism on the basis of little more than ideological prejudice.

More alarmingly still, over a period of three years the Foreign Office invested £2.6 million in the activities of the GDI. On Sunday Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, the Foreign Secretary, ­revealed that the Government had ended its financial relationship with the GDI in March 2023. That is a reassuring development: no Government in a democratic society should have a hand in the covert suppression of free and open inquiry.

Though their activities may be largely opaque to the reading public, ratings agencies such as the GDI are able to exercise considerable influence within the complex ecosystem of online news. Acting as powerful intermediaries between online advertisers cautious of managing their reputations and news websites seeking advertising revenue, rating agencies have the power to effectively starve an outlet of income if they judge it to have propagated disinformation. If they choose to downrate a news outlet, its advertising revenue can be reduced to a trickle: in the case of small media outlets with fragile financial models, the decisions of ratings agencies determine their survival.

What makes the influence of the GDI so pernicious is the dubiously broad construal of ‘disinformation’ it now employs. Not content with identifying false information, it now seeks to damage the financial model of websites it deems to be publishing “adversarial narratives”. According to its founder, Clare Melford, this extension of its remit has enabled the GDI to target outlets whose work was judged to be merely “harmful” or “divisive”. The creeping manner in which its self-ascribed remit has shifted illustrates a sinister irony of the anti-disinformation industry: in setting themselves up as neutral arbiters of accuracy, the influence of their own biases risks creating a new form of misinformation.

Some of the specific verdicts reached by the GDI are dubious, to say the least. Its influence came to public attention last month after an investigation by the website UnHerd, which found itself placed on a “dynamic exclusion list” by the GDI, costing it thousands of pounds in revenue. The GDI’s ground for blacklisting UnHerd was the website’s longstanding practice of publishing articles by sex-realist feminists, including the philosopher Kathleen Stock, whose writing the GDI considered to be part of an “anti-LGBTQI+ narrative”.

Worth reading in full.