Group Owned by Microsoft Tried to Break Conservative Groups

Brandon Morse writes for RedState.com about one effort to shut down conservative organizations.

The attack on conservatives by major corporations, internet companies, and political activist groups is nothing new. This doesn’t just include conservatives, but conservative sites as well. There have been repeated high-profile attempts at silencing conservative news and opinion sites, usually by attacking their ability to generate revenue from ads using flimsy excuses about misinformation or hate speech.

According to the Washington Examiner, new information has been discovered about a low-profile attempt to target conservative sites by blacklisting them for various “safety” reasons. This includes sites such as Daily Wire, Newsmax, Epoch Times, and even RedState.

The Examiner revealed the existence of the “Global Disinformation Index,” a British organization with two American affiliates that was bought by Microsoft in 2021 for $1 billion. This company is responsible for giving blacklists to ad companies like Xandr to restrict ad dollars and break conservative websites financially, effectively silencing them.

One senior executive at an ad company stepped forward to speak with the Examiner under the condition of anonymity and revealed Microsoft is, in fact, playing dirty:

“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.” …

… Unsurprisingly, websites deemed “less risky” have leftist biases, including NPR, Washington Post, and the New York Times. BuzzFeed and ProPublica did not appear in the dataset but were “approved” for ads by GDI.

This list becomes more sinister when you see that Democrats in Congress are attached to it. As the Washington Examiner notes, GDI accepted $250,000 in 2021 from the State Department via The National Endowment for Democracy, a non-profit authorized through congress.