Documents obtained by The Federalist show that students at The University of Texas at Austin's Global Disinformation Lab are behind the Global Disinformation Index's (GDI) report blacklisting independent media outlets such as The Federalist, the New York Post, the Daily Caller, and the Washington Examiner.
Internal communications show that the academics who run UT Austin's Global Disinformation Lab are, as you might expect, rabidly anti-conservative. The more than 1,000 pages of evidence that The Federalist obtained demonstrate a pro-leftist agenda at the lab, which declared the following 10 media outlets, all of which lean conservative, as the "riskiest" in terms of spreading "misinformation" and "disinformation:"
1. American Spectator
2. Newsmax
3. The Federalist
4. American Conservative
5. One America News
6. The Blaze
7. Daily Wire
8. RealClearPolitics
9. Reason
10. New York Post
Conversely, the top 10 "least risky" media outlets include the usual left-wing suspects, which are not even worth mentioning as you can probably guess what many of them are anyway (hint: they include the loudest and most well-known corporate media names).
(Related: American taxpayers are inadvertently funding all this censorship without even knowing it.)
If you pay taxes, you're funding censorship
The stated purpose of the GDI is to "remove the financial incentive" to create "disinformation," with the "core output" being the "dynamic exclusion lists" mentioned previously. In other words, the minds behind GDI hope to financially cut off the independent media at the knees while propping up the legacy media.
GDI makes money by selling its list subscriptions to various marketing organizations, which use the information to pull advertising dollars from the "risky" media outlets, effectively starving them of the funding they need to continue their operations.
One such marketing organization that has done just that is Xandr, a Microsoft-owned company that used GDI's exclusion list to limit advertising dollars to conservative-leaning media outlets. Since being exposed, however, Xandr has reportedly stopped using the blacklist for such purposes.
We also now know that GDI gets funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, which between 2020 and 2021 funneled more than half a million dollars into the scheme. Also in 2021, the State Department's Global Engagement Center awarded GDI $100,000 collected from American taxpayers.
Up until now, it was not known that UT Austin students are largely behind this so-called Censorship Industrial Complex. We knew that the federal government under fake president Joe Biden was involved, along with basically the whole of Silicon Valley, but the UT link flew under the radar.
The Federalist connected a few dots, filed a public records request, and voila: It became known as of February that UT Austin students have been leading the charge to blacklist the independent media from behind the curtain.
Citing "confidentiality of trade secrets" and "certain commercial or financial information," UT Austin is refusing to disclose the actual methodology and research it is using to compile these blacklists. Even so, it is undeniably clear that a left-wing bias is driving the agenda.
"The internal documents from the University of Texas' GDIL show that the Global Disinformation Index, in essence, paid the state university to manage student workers who would then apply the GDI methodology to rate the various media outlets and write the final report," writes The Federalist's Margot Cleveland.
"The students received minimum training for the project. When GDIL struggled to meet the deadlines, the lab manager, Sally Dickson, stepped in to help with the ratings, with everyone rushing the reviews of the various media outlets. At the conclusion of the project, UT Austin retained the surplus funds GDI was paid for the work."
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