by WorldTribune Staff, May 27, 2025 Real World News
A leftist nonprofit group which received federal funds boasted about how it killed $100 million in advertising revenue to mostly independent and conservative media outlets by deeming them “disinformation spreaders.”
The UK-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI) was awarded grants to fight perceived disinformation via its U.S.-based affiliate, AN Foundation, from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a congressionally chartered and taxpayer-funded agency in Washington. The grants were officially designated as targeting foreign “disinformation” spreaders.
The new documentation of U.S. government-backed censorship of independent media like WorldTribune.com is not an isolated development as reported here.
The GDI also boasted that it had suppressed the reach of President Donald Trump’s messaging, Just the News reported on May 19, citing newly disclosed memos.
GDI said that it had created a report called “Bankrolling Bigotry: An Overview of the Online Funding Strategies of American Hate Groups” that relied heavily on a so-called “hate index” from the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center to warn that “hatred is surging across the United States, threatening the safety, security and wellbeing of minority communities.”
The group urged advertisers to cut off revenue to media outlets that the hate index deemed to spread disinformation.
“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 wrote in a memo. Demonetization refers to the practice of pressuring advertisers and gaming search engines in order to reduce, or even remove, earnings from YouTube and other social media platforms relied upon by publishers.
Partnering with a “trusted ad tech analytics organization,” GDI estimated that during a 15-month period, from March 2020 to September 2021, the number of bids sent to the approximately 1,200 sites listed on its “Dynamic Exclusion List” was halved, leading to an estimated $100 million lost in collective revenue, one memo states.
GDI’s own index identified 10 American news media outlets as superspreaders of disinformation, almost all of them conservative voices, including the New York Post, The Daily Wire, Newsmax, The Federalist, and The Blaze, among others.
Michael Chamberlain, head of the nonprofit watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust, which obtained the memos under the Freedom of Information Act, said the memos proved that while NED’s effort was billed as targeting overseas propaganda, it ended up routinely focusing on suppressing American speech, mostly right-leaning or conservative in nature.
“The Censorship Industrial Complex was hard at work early in this decade, and they were using taxpayer dollars to do so,” Chamberlain told Just the News in an interview. “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.”
Mike Benz, the founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online and a major anti-censorship activist, said the documents were stunning and disturbing.
“I am absolutely disgusted by these revelations, as should be every American and every world citizen to see the US government, under the Biden administration, actively funding a full-out campaign to pressure advertisers to defund private independent news sites who competed with the Biden State Department’s media narratives,” Benz told Just the News.
“Everyone involved in this should be fired, and frankly, NED itself must be defunded,” he added.
Nonprofit group boasted to Feds it suppressed advertising for alternative media added by Editor Two on May 27, 2025
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