“To reduce disinformation, we need to remove the financial incentive to create it,” the Global Disinformation Index declares on its mission page. But as the Washington Examiner exposed last week, the self-appointed arbiter of truth doesn’t seek to silence the legacy corporate outlets that repeatedly peddled false stories. Rather, it demands the widespread censorship of conservative webpages that got those stories correct by branding the right-leaning sites the “riskiest” ones when it comes to “disinformation.”
It is not conservative new outlets that are “risky,” however. And it isn’t even “disinformation” that’s risky: Disinformation — whatever that means — can be countered with the truth. What is risky is the growing belief that experts can both dictate what is deceptive and declare that such speech should be censored.
A simple graphic from the GDI’s summary of its “Disinformation Risk in the United States Online Media Market,” crystalizes the implications of the censorship approach pushed by GDI by establishing that if the outlets GDI seeks to silence were muted, the public would remain ignorant about important questions of national security, government malfeasance, corruption, and major policy matters.
Compare, for instance, the first two media outlets GDI identifies as the “least risky sites” and “riskiest sites” — NPR and the New York Post, respectively — and their coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story. The New York Post not only broke the story but provided a detailed analysis of material recovered from the abandoned MacBook that implicated then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in
