By GABE KAMINSKY | WASHINGTON EXAMINER
An advertising company owned by Microsoft that subscribes to a left-leaning group’s secret blacklist for conservative media outlets has been internally flagging right-leaning websites and has taken steps to defund and deplatform them, according to records obtained by the Washington Examiner and whistleblowers in the advertising industry.
The blacklisted sites include The Daily Signal, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Mike Huckabee, Judicial Watch.
The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British organization with at least two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups, is feeding secret blacklists to ad companies, such as Xandr, owned by Microsoft, with the intent of shutting down websites peddling alleged “disinformation.”
Editor’s note: Global Disinformation Index is also funded by major liberal groups, including George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, and the Argosy Foundation, a pro-abortion foundation founded by the founder of Boston Scientific. The Catena Foundation is an environmentalist group, and the Knight Foundation is associated with mainstream media. Others include:
Now, sets of documents and emails leaked to the Washington Examiner shed light on how Xandr, which Microsoft bought in 2021 for $1 billion, has targeted disfavored speech and blocked conservative websites from reaping key ad dollars.
“Xandr’s use of politically motivated flags on this blacklist stands outside of the norm in advertising,” said a senior executive at an ad company, noting that the real purpose of blacklisting should be to protect brands from advertising “on content that is illegal, fraudulent, [or] low-quality.”
“In this case, Xandr prevented us from talking to our voters in the critical days leading up to Election Day,” the executive, who was granted anonymity to discuss confidential company matters, told the Washington Examiner. “Our audience reads the Examiner, Daily Wire, Townhall, etc. Voters go to these news & opinion sites [to] inform their decisions. And if Microsoft is using their technology to block us from showing ads on these websites, they’re actively preventing us from talking to voters on the public squares where their decisions are being informed.”
GDI’s “dynamic exclusion list” includes at least 2,000 domains, many of which are “foreign state-sponsored news and opinion sites, forums that traffic in disinformation, and explicitly sanctioned websites,” according to a second source close to Microsoft. Each month, GDI sends Xandr a list of websites on this blacklist, said the source.
The Washington Examiner revealed on Thursday that it is on GDI’s list and spoke to an ad-buying source who said Breitbart News is also. Separately, GDI has said that the 10 “riskiest” news outlets for purported disinformation are the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News Network, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post.
An executive in the ad industry who contracts with conservative media outlets provided the Washington Examiner with internal Xandr data showing which websites the group has financially punished. That data were uploaded by the Washington Examiner to a spreadsheet and can be viewed below.
GDI has received $330,000 combined from entities under the State Department , which led to First Amendment lawyers and members of Congress raising concerns over how this could be legal.
State Department-backed groups that underwrite DGI include National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit group that receives nearly all of its funding from annual congressional appropriations, and Disinfo Cloud, a now defunct platform through the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. Disinfo Cloud was used between 2018 and 2021 by Congress and over a dozen federal agencies, including the Departments of Defense, Energy, Treasury, and the FBI , according to the State Department.
Read about how the State Department has collaborated to defund conservative news.
