SUMMARY
- 81 House Republicans voted with Democrats re-fund the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
- The NED is a nonprofit funded by Congress since the 1980s, and a major source of US foreign soft power.
- NED has been repurposed from an anti-Soviet Cold War to combatting disinformation, resulting in the censorship of Americans.
- The NED funded the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a foreign entity that has created tools to financially blacklist center-right American media.
- In a message to NED, GDI reported approvingly that it had been credited with reducing President Donald Trump’s reach on social media.
- GDI has filed suit against the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after the agency sent Civil Investigative Demand (CID), similar to subpoenas, demanding documents, communications, and financial records from GDI
As FFO recently reported, 81 Republican members of the House of Representatives recently voted with 210 Democrats to re-fund the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Congressionally funded Cold War soft power organization that turned its attention to suppressing “disinformation” after 2016.
In doing so, those Members of Congress have voted to re-fund an organization with a documented track record of using American taxpayer dollars intended for foreign operations to wage partisan campaigns of censorship against domestic political opponents – specifically President Trump and his supporters.
As an ostensibly nonpartisan foreign-facing organization whose funds are managed by the U.S. State Department, NED (much like the CIA) is not supposed to involve itself in domestic U.S. politics. It is certainly not allowed to do so in a partisan manner, or fund any efforts aimed at undermining particular elected officials.
And yet, in a quarterly report to NED, the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British “counter-disinformation” org that received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the U.S. taxpayer via NED, bragged that its efforts had led to the censoring of Donald Trump on social media — while the President was still in office, during his first term.
It has also emerged that the GDI isn’t merely a foreign entity — it’s linked to the UK’s Ministry of Defence. Researchers on X have uncovered that a longtime GDI employee, who briefly served as the organization’s Chief Technology Officer, was also Senior Principal Scientist at UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory from 2022 onwards, overlapping with her work at GDI. During the 1990s, Linkedin records show she worked for the Defence Research Agency at the UK Ministry of Defence, then the country’s largest science and technology organization.
GDI then boasted about its ability to choke revenue from disfavored media outlets.
“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.
GDI said that from March 2020 to September 2021, after partnering with a trusted tech analytics firm, that the number of bids sent to the 1,200 sites listed on its Dynamic Exclusion List,” its blacklist of disfavored media outlets, was halved, resulting in an estimated $100 million in lost collective revenue by these outlets.
The NED cut ties with the Global Disinformation Index amidst public backlash against GDI.
“Recently, we became aware that one of our grantees, the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), was engaged in an initiative, funded by a different donor, that focused on specific U.S. media outlets,” NED wrote in February 2023.
GDI is resisting further attempts to discover the scale of its interaction with US entities, and the support it received from the US government and its cutouts. It has filed suit against the Federal Trade Commission after the agency sent a series of Civil Investigative Demand (CID), which are similar to subpoenas.
According to a Washington Examiner investigation titled “Disinformation Inc.: Meet the Groups Hauling in Cash to Secretly Blacklist Conservative News,” GDI’s blacklisting operation extended far beyond broad media categories and into the systematic targeting of specific conservative and Trump-supporting figures.
The report detailed how GDI’s Dynamic Exclusion List and related risk-rating tools were pitched to advertisers and ad-tech platforms as a way to avoid placing ads next to outlets and personalities deemed “high risk” for disinformation. In practice, this resulted in financial penalties for media organizations and commentators aligned with President Donald Trump and the broader America First movement, including members of Trump’s political orbit, pro-Trump digital commentators, conservative talk radio hosts, and media figures critical of progressive positions on election integrity, immigration, and COVID-19 mandates.
Every media outlet placed on GDI’s “high risk” list for advertiser blacklisting was conservative or Trump-supporting:
The American Spectator
- Newsmax
- The Federalist
- The American Conservative
- One America News
- The Blaze
- The Daily Wire
- RealClearPolitics
- Reason
- The New York Post
Internal materials reviewed by the Examiner indicated that GDI actively tracked the reduction in advertising bids and revenue flowing to these outlets as a measure of success. What was framed publicly as a neutral effort to combat “disinformation” functioned, in practice, as a coordinated effort to financially marginalize right-leaning media institutions.
And because GDI’s funding stream included U.S. taxpayer dollars routed through the National Endowment for Democracy, this meant that Americans were funding a partisan campaign against NED’s domestic political critics.
In NED’s Own Words: The Campaign Against Trump
Damon Wilson, the CEO of NED, was appointed to lead the organization during President Joe Biden’s time in office. From 2021 to 2021, he was executive vice president of the Atlantic Council, when the nonprofit led anti-Trump activities, including the now-infamous election integrity partnership. The partnership pushed for the censorship of pro-Trump voices as well as the president during the 2020 election.
During his time at the Atlantic Council, Wilson personally oversaw a 2019 conference, where tweets from President Trump were displayed as examples of disinformation.
One of the most active “counter-disinformation” researchers, Dean Jackson, who worked at NED throughout Trump’s first term in office, has admitted in live interviews that it was Trump’s election which spurred his own work in the burgeoning field of censorship operations.
He would go on to undermine the earliest justifications for counter-disinformation operations, the claim that it was purely a mechanism to counter foreign adversaries, instead claiming that it was “hyper partisan” and “conservative” media that were doing a “tremendous amount of damage to American democracy.”
These are the words of a NED counter-disinformation expert who conducted his work for the organization during the first Trump administration: domestic speech, not foreign, was the real threat to be contained.
