Global Disinformation Index

Now, we talk about censorship like colloquially in a much broader way, but the reason that that distinction is important and the reason that civil society is so important to this broader picture is that I think at some level, you know, the proponents of the CIC, they understand that they can't just... or they will have less credibility in just saying the Biden administration is censoring everyone on the right, although that argument, you know, has al-also been made.

What they're saying, though, is that because the government cannot directly censor perhaps the way they want to, they do it through what Mike Benz and others have called government cutouts or here the, the academic institutions like the Stanford Internet Observatory or the nonprofit groups like, uh, the Global Disinformation Index to do the censoring that the government cannot do.

And so now to go back to your question, what's actually interesting is that the attacks on these government offices actually was preceded and in a way predicted perhaps by the attacks on these nonprofits and academic institutions.

That was happening back in twenty twenty-two, twenty twenty-three.

Great question.

Most of them do, but not all of them.

So one of the targets was a group called the Global Disinformation Index, which is a London-based nonprofit that rates different websites for how brand safe they are or just how reliable they are.

That was central to a lot of the, the narratives around conspiracy, uh, and, and censorship.