Readers may recall that I have been on the “disinformation industry” beat lately, and it is a grim one indeed. (For those unaware, I am referring to the newly arisen, ghoulish industry that vampirically gorges itself on the bodies of its willing, almost grateful victims: “woke” corporate America, academia, the mainstream media, and the federal government itself.)
Most recently, I wrote about the Global Disinformation Index, a British company whose explicit ideological goal is to blacklist and deplatform disfavored speech ranging from bonkers (“Trump won the 2020 election”) to mainstream center-left (“my teenage daughter may not actually be a boy”). The Washington Examiner kicked the coverage off with a well-reported piece about GDI’s sinister mission, influence, and connections (Judson Berger commented on it here as well), and has continued banging the drum about how Microsoft in particular has begun using its blacklists.
Score one for sanity then, because Microsoft (specifically its advertising company Xandr) seems to have backed down. According an update from the Examiner,
Microsoft has launched a review of its relationship with GDI and has suspended usage of the group’s services.
“We try to take a principled approach to accuracy and fighting foreign propaganda,” a spokesperson said on Saturday evening. “We’re working quickly to fix the issue and Xandr has stopped using GDI’s services while we are doing a larger review.”
While this is good news indeed — and all credit to the Examiner for excellent investigative-reporting work that made the case clearly and convincingly and got Microsoft to act — the far greater bad news is that it had to come to this at all. That it has is a sign of the marked decline of viewpoint-neutrality as a guiding ethos to regulating the public sphere. That is airy theory; the blunt reality is that the corruption of this ideal is going to hit one side far harder than the other, and if you’re reading this piece you know which side it is.
As I noted elsewhere, it is outrageously predictable that the subjective whims of one British company, infected with a transparently progressive bias and working without any proper supervision, could affect the corporate decision-making process of Microsoft in such a sweeping way, leaving conservatives only with an after-the-fact appeal.
But then that’s only one link in the chain: the State Department — our federal government, using taxpayer money — funded GDI to the tune of $200,000. GDI in turn cranked out a list (based on phony “scholarly studies” brought forth by academia and the likes of the Brookings Institute) of “disinformation websites” that conveniently included a slew of mainstream ones, while GDI and its peers continue to tell the government that the First Amendment is a Bigger Problem Than Ever and, incidentally, they need more money. It’s an ouroboros of multi-industry self-dealing and corruption, a mutually reinforcing web of dependencies and benefits weaving itself together into a new power center in the American media complex. And the parties — all of whom feel threatened by various unruly external factors in society — are all consenting in full to the exchange.
Today we got lucky because the Examiner made its case. Tomorrow we may not, or our appeals may be ignored (they availed the New York Post naught in 2020, and the future is always full of disappointments), because we, as conservatives — or even people committed to the truth regardless of partisan valence — do not take part in the media conversation on equal terms anymore. We will be hearing more about this story in the future, I suspect.