A “non-profit” that became infamous for acting as a government-funded censorship proxy bragged to federal officials about suppressing President Donald Trump and right-leaning media favorable to him online, according to newly uncovered reports obtained by Just the News.
The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) claimed that its ad-boycott efforts cut advertising revenue by $100 million for news sources it smeared as “disinformation” spreaders. Even more concerning, GDI made these admissions in progress reports to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a congressionally chartered agency, as seen in internal documents.
In one such report, GDI openly boasted about its censorship impact amid what it described as a surge in “hatred” online: “This period, we turned our minds to evaluation of GDI's impact; specifically, to how we might measure the demonetization achieved through uptake of our risk ratings by brands and/or ad tech platforms.”
GDI even admitted to targeting Trump specifically. Notably, the Media Research Center has highlighted NED’s funding to GDI, identifying the group as a taxpayer-backed tool for censorship in its 57 Biden censorship initiatives report.
Among the key individuals involved in this censorship collusion were then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Global Engagement Center Special Envoys Lea Gabrielle and James Rubin, Army Lt. Gen. Stephen Fogarty and NED expert Scott Carpenter.
The censorship proxy also cited a New York Times article on the censorship industry’s campaign to silence Trump's social media presence and how his reach and amplification significantly dropped after Big Tech platforms caved to pressure and censored him. GDI framed this research on Trump’s social media reach after he was deplatformed by the majority of major U.S. social media platforms in 2021 as showcasing an achievement.
“Our press coverage during the quarter included a front-page article in The New York Times citing GDI research on the dramatic drop in reach of Trump's statements once the bullhorn of the social media algorithms was removed,” the censorship proxy bragged. This, in part, confirms what the MRC and others have reported about how the government censorship cartel (government bureaucracy and private sector) worked in tandem to silence opposition to the left’s agenda.
But Trump wasn’t the only target. GDI claimed he was leading a movement of hatred. Sources cited in the progress report included a 2017 article from the radical New Yorker titled “How Trump uses ‘religious liberty’ to attack LGBT rights.” According to GDI, this justified wider censorship.
The group asserted that by partnering with an ad tech analytics organization, it managed to cut in half the number of bids to the 1,200 sites on its blacklist — the “Dynamic Exclusion List” — between March 2020 and September 2021. MRC previously reported that GDI labeled right-leaning outlets like The Daily Wire, The Blaze and The Federalist as the most unreliable on its blacklist.
Michael Chamberlain, who leads the watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust, and obtained the newly released documentation, torched GDI in comments to Just the News.
“The Censorship Industrial Complex was hard at work early in this decade, and they were using taxpayer dollars to do so,” he said. "They effectively gave funding to GDI to look at disinformation, misinformation in foreign countries, such as countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America—Nigeria, India, Malaysia, Mexico are mentioned specifically in the grant application.”
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