American Thought Leaders - The Secret Ratings Agencies That Control Media Advertising: Freddie Sayers

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

“In this complex machinery, there are these things called ratings agencies ... and they put a number on how trustworthy individual publications are,” says Freddie Sayers. “If they give you a zero or they put you on the naughty list, you don’t get any advertising. Your business model is pretty much turned off overnight.”Mr. Sayers is the editor-in-chief of UnHerd, and he recently started looking into the systems of programmatic advertising after he discovered UnHerd had been given a zero rating for trustworthiness and placed on a “dynamic exclusion list” by the Global Disinformation Index.In this episode, he breaks down what he’s uncovered about the workings of what he calls “the disinformation industry.”“This is taxpayer dollars flowing into completely unaccountable, self-created organizations,” Mr. Sayers says.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Extraordinarily, we have now found ourselves on this blacklist. There are these things called ratings agencies, and they put a number on how trustworthy individual publications are. So if they give you a zero or they put you on the naughty list, your business model is pretty much turned off overnight. At the recent Dissident Dialogues conference in New York, I sat down with Freddie Sayers, editor-in-chief of UnHerd. We were quote-unquote anti-LGBTQI plus on the grounds that we publish quote-unquote

gender-critical feminists. In this episode, he breaks down what he's uncovered about the workings of the disinformation industry. This is taxpayer dollars flowing into completely unaccountable, self-created organizations. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Freddie Sayers, it's so good to have you on American Thought Leaders here at Dissident Dialogues, which actually you are putting on. Yes, we are sponsoring it. It's the first of its kind. We're here in Brooklyn in

a strange kind of industrial park overlooking Manhattan, a bit of water between us. And it's been amazing. We're in day two now. These are groups of people who are intelligent, interesting, heterodox, as the phrase goes. You know, they come from all parts of the political spectrum, but we are addressing issues that many people find difficult to talk about. And we're doing it in, I hope, a fun and constructive atmosphere. And there's some 800 plus people here, which I think is an incredibly positive sign. Well, an amazing thing that I want to talk about, I'm not going to start with this, but you know, you are a UK, I'll call it a dissident media, right? A heterodox media. A media that I actually go to regularly, and there aren't many.

Take that as a compliment. 100% is. But you decided to come here and do this. I want to talk about that. But before we go there, the thing that I really wanted to talk to you about is your exposure of this global disinformation index, the GDI. And how your company has been targeted, ability to do advertising, and frankly, threatening your whole business, your ability to do this amazing work that you do.

So why don't you tell me about that? Sure. So I wasn't even familiar with any of this. We didn't even have ads on our website. We are a subscription-based business, and that was fine. We thought we'd try that out and get some additional revenue, as many media publishers do. our site our publication you know it's kind of intellectual sometimes it's cultural sometimes it's political we have big cultural icons like you know Nick Cave the rock star or we have professors Nobel Prize winners it's all kind of it's interesting we're

provocative we go into dangerous questions but it's all done very responsibly and it's all kind of, it's interesting, we're provocative, we go into dangerous questions, but it's all done very responsibly and it's widely known in the UK as something that a lot of people read. Each of the advertising agencies we went to, we went to three in succession, had huge hopes for the amount of revenue we could generate through this because they were like, this is a beautiful product, you have a very big audience, both here in the UK, but also in America where we're growing a lot, and they were like this is a beautiful product you have a very big audience both here in the UK but also in America where where we're growing a lot and they were excited and then each time the numbers that were coming in on what's called programmatic advertising this is

the mysterious very complex system in the internet that actually sends specific advertisements to different publications almost nothing was coming in it It was 2%, 3% of the numbers they were expecting. And literally, the advertising agencies themselves couldn't make head or tail of it. They did not understand it. So we tried another one, had the same experience. And eventually, on ad agency number three, we discovered what was going on, which is that in this complex machinery, there are these things called ratings agencies, which most people have never heard of. It's kind of like a credit rating agency for a bank or a financial product. And they put a number on how trustworthy individual publications are.

And for whatever reason, one of them, which is called the Global Disinformation Index, had given us a zero score. So they put us on what they know they refer to as their dynamic exclusion list. The naughty list, clearly. Yes, it's the black list. It's the list of the most dangerous publications, apparently, which to all of us was a bit baffling because everything we write is fact-checked and carefully sourced. There's nothing dangerous about it. We went up through the food chain. So you go up to an advertising agency. They then go to these distribution platforms. In this case, it was

Oracle, the huge technology company, which is started by Larry Ellison. And they, in turn, use this organization called the Global Disinformation Index to provide ratings on websites. And if they give you a zero or they put you on the naughty list, you don't get any advertising. Your business model is pretty much turned off overnight. So they have enormous power, huge influence. So we were really trying to dig into who these people are and how it came about that these organizations have so much influence. The first thing we found is we actually managed to get a response from them.

Now this is hard because if you've ever had any experience with this, often these big technology companies, these mysterious entities don't like to be transparent. They don't like to answer you. But almost by accident, because they sent an email to Oracle and that was then forwarded down to us, they explained why we had been put on this list. And the answer was that we were, quote-unquote, anti-LGBTQI+, as they refer to it, on the grounds that we publish, quote-unquote, gender-critical feminists. So this is the kind of fancy term for people who believe there is a biological difference between men and women. And in particular, they actually referenced one of our most famous columnists,

who's a philosophy professor called Kathleen Stock. She's actually been here at the festival this weekend, and she's widely read in the UK. She's a brilliant mind and a brilliant writer. And she has been pushing back over the past few years against some of this gender ideology, raising awareness of the potential dangers for transitioning kids when we don't know enough about it.

All of those questions, which at least in the UK, have now become pretty mainstream. We had a big government inquiry called the Cass Review literally weeks ago that has just put a stop to any gender transitioning for minors, for people under 18. And by the way, what a service to the world, not just to the UK, I might add. It's been very valuable for America, for Canada, my home nation as well. Comprehensive comprehensive and in no small measure it was brave voices like Kathleen Stark who were years ago when this was very hard to say and was very considered very controversial carefully and consistently making the case that this wasn't thought through there wasn't evidence

for it and it had philosophical problems and she did that in a very brave way and that has led now to changes in government policy that are I should should also add, popular in the majority of the population. So to me, that's like a case study of exactly what good journalism should do. You know, we've grandly called this dissident dialogues. Obviously, we're not true dissidents in that sense. There's actually someone on stage in a moment from Iran who is a true dissident faces real danger. But to be outside the mainstream, to ask those difficult questions that the central narrative doesn't really like is exactly what journalists should be doing. It's the heart of journalism, precisely.

So I'm extremely proud of what Kathleen Stock was doing and she rightfully is too. And for whatever reason, this inclusion, this organization, the GDI, Global Disinformation Index, thought that publishing her managed to be disinformation. So the second thing we found out, having looked into their history, is that first of all, when they launched in 2018, they had a commitment to transparency. They were going to publish all of these ratings so that everyone could see the information. That, over the years, has been watered down. It's now become a very secretive organization. In the huge amount of press attention our expose has had,

we've had members of parliament, cabinet ministers. Elon Musk himself has been tweeting about it, been messaging about it. It's been a huge amount of public interest in this. Not a peep from the Global Disinformation Index, complete silence. Their strategy apparently is to hide, to remain hidden in the complexity and hope that the story goes away. And I'm hoping that that doesn't happen because it's important that we find out more about them. So over that period since 2018 when they were founded they have changed their definition of disinformation. So originally they called it

which you might think makes quite a lot of sense I think it's factual inaccuracies that are deliberately put about. So basically people lying on purpose is what they used to call disinformation. And you can possibly see that there could be a good purpose for to have organizations looking out for those clear-cut examples and calling them out. Personally, I think you would run into problems quite rapidly, even if they were doing only that, because as we've seen over the last few years, what is kind of officially considered disinformation can quite quickly be revealed to be true. Subsequently, we had examples during COVID and a lot of other big stories like that. But that's how they began. They've subsequently adopted what their founder describes as a more useful definition, which is something called adversarial narratives. So their new software, their algorithms

and their researchers at the GDI are now able to identify anything which they consider to be an adversarial narrative. That is, even if something is factually true, the narrative that it engages in goes against a person or an institution or a scientific endeavor that they consider needs protecting, that makes it adversarial, that makes it disinformation. So extraordinarily, we have now found ourselves on this blacklist and it's, you know, extremely damaging to our business. Luckily, we have a lot of revenue sources. We have a club and a restaurant in London.

We have a thriving subscriber base and we're fine. But for smaller publications or for people who are entirely reliant on ads, which is one of the most normal ways for a media business to function, it could have been terminal. So I really think it's very important that we find out these kind of mechanisms, discover where else they are on the internet, and do our best to bring a bit more transparency and common sense to them. You know, it's fascinating to me. You really haven't encountered this problem up to now? Well, we hadn't served ads. You were subscribed.

No, I don't mean specifically around ads, but being, you know, this is another form of what you might call cancellation, right? Just kind of in a little bit of a more surreptitious way, right? If you were a media that relies entirely on ads and you get a zero, you're done. That's right. I mean, that's the explicit purpose of this organization, to disrupt and defund what they consider the purveyors of disinformation.

But yes, I mean, look, we've had encounters with YouTube, as I'm sure many publications have had, with Facebook. We've had arguments with them over certain videos during COVID that they considered misinformation and that was subsequently withdrawn by them. But to me, what was new about this was, first of all, just how hidden it was and yet how influential. And also, which we discovered, the fact that it's government funded. So when you look at the funding for this organization, the money comes from, as well as certain private providers that you might expect,

such as the Soros Foundation, money from the United Kingdom government via the foreign office, money from the State Department via some entities that the State Department has funded, money from the European Union and from the German foreign office. So, you know, this is taxpayer dollars flowing into completely unaccountable, self-created organizations that are basically acting as maybe not censors exactly because they don't have the power to completely block content, but it's tantamount to if they can destroy the business model of a publication. So I should say I don't deny that disinformation is an issue, that the Internet is wide open

and that all sorts of crazy things are said on it, and no doubt many of them are untrue and that people can believe false things. That is self-evident to anyone who's spent a single day on it. But as a mechanism to combat that, this cannot be the right way to go, to put government money into these mysterious organizations that then take what I consider to be very partisan, subjective definitions of disinformation and just quietly apply them with no accountability at all. I think it's very hard to defend that as a system. Well, especially since it's so non-transparent and you don't even, you wouldn't know that this is even happening. You would wonder to yourself, why can't I serve any good ads that are worth anything?

Or why can't I, why is my video only going to five people and not, surely it's better than that, right? But there's actually someone there putting their finger on the scale, right? This is, I think, an issue. Look, these kind of entities, I hope we can now try and shine more light on and do something about. But I think the wider problem is this lack of transparency. And it actually makes the paranoia worse. You know, when you talk to people

who are in the anti-disinformation movement, many of them are good people. They think they're doing a real service by trying to block bad information and they're worried about division conspiracy theories etc the thing is the one way to make it worse to make more people paranoid and conspiratorial is to actually go around secretly turning off media publishers and paying for it with government money because everyone will look at that and say, I told you there are these distant elites that exert power

on what I'm allowed to say and what I'm not allowed to say. So I deeply believe that it's very counterproductive. And if they want to bring people together and restore trust in media and government and all of the things that they're trying to do. Don't do this. So tell me, what is the idea behind UnHerd? So UnHerd, it's spelled U-N-H-E-R-D. So we are away from the herd. We don't like herd mentality. And it's been around for about seven years out of the UK. And really, I suppose during 2020, 2021, we really started taking off because we're trying to be a space

where you can question some of these orthodoxies and yet do it in a way that is not reactionary. It's not out there. It doesn't dispense with fact-checking, ironically, given that we've just been pointed out as dangerous. I was going to say that I find it quite rigorous, at least my experience. Of course, you have a lot of columnists, but the columnists are very, let's see, they've earned my trust,

many of them. Well, I think it's easy if you're in the more anti-establishment space to get very cynical and basically have as your rule of thumb that whatever you're being told by the mainstream is going to be wrong or it's a lie. And you do get a... There are a lot of websites, a lot of publications that basically just pump out the opposite of that every day. And that, I think,

is not especially helpful either, because it just creates a new pole, a new kind of herd, to use our language, which is just, it's like lining up different teams. What we're trying to do is, yeah, actually consider the issues as real issues. And if they're true, we say they're true. If they're not, we say they're not true. Let's have a variety of opinion. Let's have people from the left and the right. Let's try and be thoughtful. Let's try and be funny. Let's try and be well-written. Pretty much what journalism used to be or should be. How would you envision, you know, you've had this experience now where you saw there's this kind of underbelly, what would you say is the way that you think it should work, given that there is this sort of disinformation?

So there's, you know, one of the views is just more information is better, right? But it's a new world. And there's so many of these different sources of information. There's actually, there are actually international players that have malign intent, pushing all sorts of information into the system. It's very difficult to make. Have you thought about this? A few ideas. I think, number one, let's make a hard distinction between international and your own citizens. Because it's one thing for the government to be saying, okay, there's a bot farm in Russia and it's sending traffic to this Russian website that's trying to make people believe X or Y about Vladimir Putin. Okay, I think a lot of citizens

would say, okay, that's the reasonable job of government to identify that. It's almost like an international attack. Okay, you know, we need to be careful with that as well, as we saw with Russiagate. Paranoia around international interventions can also be deployed politically, so we need to be careful with that. But for me, it belongs in a different category. Whilst turning spying and censorship efforts that were built for international threats onto your own population and allowing them to sort of work their way into the normal political discourse is a whole new

danger level so i would make that distinction and for anything domestic it should be a way higher bar and people should be very careful about setting up all these entities with these like Orwellian names like the global disinformation index we had a government counter disinformation unit in the UK I know there was a similar one that President Biden tried to get going in a couple of years ago that then then shut after a few weeks there's this whole flourishing of these entities. And to a lot of people, they sound like the Ministry of Truth, and they don't want them. So I think be careful domestically. If you've got to do anything, and if there need to be any attempts,

either from big corporations or from government, to try and switch off or censor flagrantly incorrect material, you want to have a very transparent process about that, I would have thought, which there isn't at the moment. So if you're going to sit in judgment on someone's pronouncement and you're going to say this is incorrect, they've got to have a process to appeal it. Everyone needs to see the rationale behind that judgment.

And, you know, let's make it like a mini court. At least then there's a process and people will understand, okay, they're accusing me of this. I can make my argument and it can be settled. But the hiddenness of a lot of these censorship endeavors, I think, make it a lot more sinister. And then finally, can the marketplace sort it out without you? Very often, government just always thinks, hey, we've got to sort this out. Oh, there's this problem, disinformation.

We're going to fix it. Often, the marketplace will come up with its own solutions. And the new Elon Musk Twitter, for example, they have these community notes, tags under certain tweets. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them, where if you put out a fact that is disputed and enough people think it's incorrect, they will add a little note, which is basically crowdsourced from other users, that they can then say, we question this fact for this reason. And it's not a perfect system. I'm sure it's extremely frustrating to some people who think they're right and the community notes are wrong.

But to me, it's preferable because at least it's organic. It comes from the bottom up rather than being top down from central government. But also, if you see a tweet that has a community note, I think you think, okay, there's a claim there, and then it's been contested, and you're made aware that it is a contested claim, and you maybe go and do your own research, maybe you come to your own view.

Better that than have the whole thing hidden from you. So I would definitely be in favor of more of those kind of approaches. So something that struck me, you know, one of my favorite UK journalists is Laura Dodsworth. I don't know if she's written for Unheard or not. I know Laura, yeah. What's that? I know Laura, she's great. Right, so she discovered some years back now the existence of this nudge unit,

you know, in the UK government. And since we've discovered that there's a lot of nudge units in a lot of governments. But there's a kind of an attitude towards the people that are doing this sort of thing. The attitude is that I know better, somehow I know better about what people are supposed to believe. Somehow you kind of know better what people are supposed to believe. I don't know if you've thought about this or what that mentality implies. This is something I'm struggling with right now personally. I think that the whole nudge phenomenon is very tied up with what we're talking about

and Laura's right to be worried about it so that came there was this famous book entitled Nudge Thaler and Cass Sunstein we actually interviewed Richard Thaler the author of that and was putting some of those challenges to him that like you've created this way of thinking where you can subconsciously influence people through clever signposts and signals uh isn't the net effect that you're just increasing paranoia and distrust and then actually it may not be worth even trying to do that and he didn't he didn't really see it that way he thought thought it was just for the health and success of the world. And the example they give people from the nudge movement is often, for example, in the UK,

where they have now auto-enrolled people into a pension scheme. This is a change in UK policy. So now when you get your paycheck, instead of you having to choose a pension scheme and buy it, you get automatically enrolled in a pension scheme and you have to actively choose to leave it. And they say that this has been a very effective example of nudging because they've gone from sort of 20% of people having pensions to 90% of people having pensions, which is good for the country. It makes the economics...

That's not nudging. That's making a decision for someone. Yeah, I think there's a real philosophical question about that. I think on an example like that, there's a debate to be had, I would have thought. You know, when you reach retirement and you suddenly find that you've got this pension that you never thought about, maybe you'd be happy.

But that's the sort of, I i guess benign end of nudging where it's like this is a government policy that is pretty obviously going to be good for people are there ways to make it easier for people to take it up and i although i think you could have a proper argument about that, and I would respect people who didn't like even that, you can see the case. But where it goes into this sense of being constantly pushed about by the environment and in your every contact with government agencies, that then is way too far, because your whole relationship with government, I think, is then altered from it being this organization that you elect to serve you, to do stuff that you want it to do through the democratic process. It flips it into an organization that is proactively trying to influence you all the time

and if you don't like the way they're influencing you you then become very paranoid and and it sort of changes your whole day-to-day life if you feel you're being pushed about and nudged all the time so i feel like the the nudge movement has gone way too far. And I would like to see a world where governments kind of step back a bit and focus on doing their job for the voters they're there to serve and having fewer proactive ideas about how they can change those voters' minds. So you've had a number of British politicians at the very least, you know, that Elon Musk got interested in this, in all these questions, because of your very

wonderfully produced video about it, by the way. I thought you were able to simplify something that is just very difficult for people to explain. That's by design, by the way. I think the complexity is part of the plan there. Right. No, actually, that's a very good point. That very complexity is how these bureaucracies manage to make so much change without attracting any attention. They make it super boring and super technical so that you send someone to sleep if you try and explain it.

And that way they remain hidden because no one wants to read a long article about online ad technology. It's like, unless you're in the industry, why would you want to do that? And so I feel like that complexity is fundamentally part of how those organizations survive. What have at least the few UK politicians that have become interested in your case, but this issue more broadly now, what have they been telling you?

What are you expecting will happen now? I gave evidence to a committee in the House of Lords, which is kind of like the Senate, the upper chamber in the UK. And they were really surprised to discover this. They didn't know about it. Their committee is devoted to the future of news. It's like a Senate or a congressional committee.

And they are producing a report which will make recommendations to government. And I was really pleased to see that I think there were 14 lords there interviewing me and hearing my testimony, right the way from very left wing to right wing. They were all, I think, unnerved to discover that this had been going on and that these entities were receiving government money. So I feel hopeful that there will be some additional caution about this. But I guess I'm not too hopeful. Because even if we get one or two entities defunded,

and some tiny little corner of the censorship complex is trimmed back, these things have a tendency to grow again. And I think we need to be very vigilant about trying to make sure that it doesn't just come back twice as strong. We have a lot of evidence that these things arose with kind of as a reaction to populism, you know, the dual Brexit and the election of President Donald Trump. And I guess the question, if there's this ideological commitment to fighting populism, this seems to be an element from multiple interviews that I've done. There's a tool called Google Trends. You've probably come across it.

It's quite useful to see how popular different things are in different years. You can type in a word and it will show you how many times it was searched for around the world. And disinformation was pretty much not a thing prior to 2016. People weren't searching for it, people weren't talking about it, it wasn't a concept that people were anxious about. During 2016 and during the Donald Trump election, that already increased four times from the beginning to the end of 2016. And then rising up to 2022 at the peak, it increased 30 times.

So you see that this concept of disinformation very much dates from 2016 and has just exploded. And I think you're right that although I'm sure there are other causes, the internet had reached a certain maturity at that point. Donald Trump, whatever you think about him, was throwing a lot of things around and was definitely kind of shooting from the hip, let's say, if we're trying to be charitable about some of his facts. So it got people very anxious. But really, I think it was about a reaction from a sort of technocratic center about how they should deal with this populist wave. And we saw it in the UK with Brexit and then, of course, Trump later in that year. And they really had two options.

One was, OK, we've now discovered that pretty much half of our populations don't like the way we're doing things. We really need to, you know, look into our heart of hearts, ask some difficult questions and change. That's the route that I would have liked them to go down. Didn't happen. Spoiler down. Didn't happen. Spoiler alert. Didn't happen. The other path, which I'm afraid is the one they took, is like, this is a threat to us. We're going to find ways to demonize those people who are voting for those populist leaders.

We're going to demonize those ideas and we're going to set up new ways of thinking such as this sort of disinformation concept that outlaws it that moves these questions which obviously are really exercising a large number of voters out of the normal political sphere where they're legitimate opinions and you argue them out and either you win or you don't win in the election into this sort of area of expertise where if you disagree with it you can be called dis or misinformation we can say it's a dangerous opinion that it goes against the experts etc and you've seen a huge amount of that, like moving issues from legitimate political debate into the realm of experts where it can then be protected

with these kind of mechanisms. I think it's really, again, backfires. It's bad for politics, it's bad for democracy, and I wish it hadn't happened. But unfortunately, that's where we are. Well, Freddie, as we finish up, is the genie out of the bottle? This is the question I keep asking myself. There's whole tracks of education dedicated to people, you know, dealing with disinformation. It's highly funded as we as we're learning in all sorts of ways. Once this sort of thing gets going, and it's been going now, like you said, since 2016, at the very least I think probably even before then somewhat is the genie out of the bottle are these you know systems are we are we stuck with them somehow I think we have to be a little bit more optimistic than that

yeah we you know I view the success of unheard for example you know we have more than 10 times our audience in the last few years. Conferences like this at Dissident Dialogue sold out successful events in the heart of New York, of all places, where you wouldn't necessarily expect lots of people to be questioning those kind of ideas, as proof that in the long term, in the fullness of time, good ideas will prevail. And I think people will not sit there and just be told that their opinions are unacceptable forever. And I think the genie is out of the bottle in the other direction, and that we should see an evening up in years to come.

Well, Freddie Sayers, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thanks for having me. Thank you all for joining Freddie Sayers and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellek.