GLOBAL DISINFORMATION INDEX

Institutional Archetype

THE REVENUE VALVE — GDI does not take a page down and does not write a model’s refusals. It rates news outlets for “disinformation risk,” compiles the ratings into an exclusion list, and hands that list to the advertising exchanges that decide where ad money is allowed to land. The chokepoint is not the speech; it is the revenue behind the speech. An outlet stays online and simply stops being paid. This profile scores that mechanism — a ratings body seated upstream of the ad-tech spigot — not the private motives of the people who run it. The structural hazard is the position: a single non-governmental scorer whose list can move advertiser money away from named publications at scale.

Mandate & Origin

The Global Disinformation Index was founded in 2018 and is based in London. It states it is “a not-for-profit company; any surplus income generated will be 100% reinvested back into the organisation to further its mission.” Its self-stated mission is to “disrupt the monetisation of disinformation” — in its own words, “We estimate the profits earned from creating, sharing, and hosting harmful content online.” Per InfluenceWatch, its principals are Clare Melford (CEO) and co-founder Daniel Rogers. The operational product is a set of “Disinformation Risk Ratings” and a “dynamic exclusion list” of roughly 2,000 websites supplied to advertisers and ad-tech. GDI frames its own output as “an independent evidence base that enables policymakers, regulators, and industry to act” — the register is research; the applied form is a list that redirects money.

Funding & Backers

The funding diagram is the tell: a private scorer of American outlets, seeded in part by the US government. Per the Washington Examiner’s 2023 investigation and Senator Grassley’s letter to the State Department, GDI-linked entities received about $330,000 in US federal money — roughly $100,000 from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (as part of a $250,000 U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge award split among grantees) and $230,000 in 2020 via the National Endowment for Democracy to the affiliated AN Foundation / Disinformation Index Foundation. Additional named backers include Open Society Foundations, the Knight Foundation, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies. The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office ceased funding GDI in 2023; the State Department’s Global Engagement Center — a documented funder of GDI, DFRLab-adjacent bodies, and others — lost its authority and shut down in December 2024.

Actions & Leadership Choices

The register is “disrupting the monetisation of disinformation.” The deed, read end to end, is a private list that withheld advertising revenue from named American outlets.

• What the list actually did. GDI ranked ten outlets its “riskiest” for disinformation — among them Reason, the New York Post, RealClearPolitics, the Daily Wire, The Federalist, Newsmax, One America News, The Blaze, the American Spectator, and the American Conservative. The Washington Examiner reported that the ad exchange Xandr (Microsoft) and other companies then declined to place ads on sites GDI flagged. Government and foundation money in, advertiser money out — the outlet stays up and stops being paid.

• The oversight response. Senator Chuck Grassley wrote to the State Department demanding an accounting of federal funding for GDI, citing the ratings’ effect on domestic outlets; the episode ran parallel to scrutiny of NewsGuard and of the Stanford Internet Observatory as the American flagging apparatus contracted between 2023 and 2026.

• The visa restriction (stated as reported). Per the series research and a public statement by the US Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy on the department’s official account, the State Department imposed a visa restriction on GDI co-founder Clare Melford in December 2025. The stated rationale, in that official’s words, tied the action to Melford’s and GDI’s characterizations of contested speech as “hate speech.” This is reported here as an official government statement, not as an independent finding of wrongdoing by Melford.

CONDUCT: STATE-SEEDED DEFUNDING VALVE. GDI does lawful not-for-profit research, and it occupies a genuinely potent position: a private scorer, seeded in part by US federal grants, whose exclusion list moved advertising revenue away from named American publications through the ad-tech exchanges. Its federal funding has since lapsed and its co-founder is, per official statement, visa-restricted; the mechanism is diminished but the shape it demonstrated — ratings upstream of the money — is the finding.

Sources: Global Disinformation Index — official site; Global Disinformation Index — InfluenceWatch; Gabe Kaminsky, “Disinformation group… bankrolled by State Department,” Washington Examiner; Robby Soave, “The U.S. State Department Funds a Disinformation Index,” Reason, 14 Feb 2023; Sen. Chuck Grassley — letter to the State Department on GDI funding (PDF); US Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy (@UnderSecPD) statement on Clare Melford / GDI (Wayback).