The Secret Ratings Agencies That Control Media Advertising: Freddie Sayers

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW]“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.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Freddie Sayers, it’s so good to have you on American Thought Leaders here at Dissident Dialogues, which you are putting on.

Freddie Sayers:
Yes, we are sponsoring it and it’s the first of its kind. We’re here in Brooklyn, in a strange kind of industrial park, overlooking Manhattan, with a bit of water between us. We’re on day two now, and it’s been amazing. These are groups of people who are intelligent, interesting, and heterodox, as the phrase goes. They come from all parts of the political spectrum.
We are addressing issues that many people find difficult to talk about. We’re doing it, I hope, in a fun and constructive atmosphere. There are 800-plus people here, which is an incredibly positive sign.

Mr. Jekielek:
Unherd is a dissident, heterodox media in the UK.

Mr. Sayers:
I take that as a compliment.

Mr. Jekielek:
It is, 100 percent. You decided to come here and put on this event. You recently exposed the Global Disinformation Index [GDI], and how your company and your ability to do advertising has been targeted. This threatens your whole business and your ability to do the amazing work that you do. Please tell us about that.

Mr. Sayers:
Sure. 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 ads out and get some additional revenue, as many media publishers do.

Our website and our publication is intellectual, sometimes it’s cultural, and sometimes it’s political. We have big cultural icons like Nick Cave, the rock star. We also have professors and Nobel Prize winners. It’s interesting and we’re provocative. We go into dangerous questions, but it’s all done very responsibly.

We are widely known in the UK as something that a lot of people read. We went to three advertising agencies in succession. We had huge hopes for the amount of revenue we could generate through these ads. The agencies said, “This is a beautiful product. You have a very big audience here in the UK and also in America,” where we are growing a lot. They were excited.

Then each time with the numbers that were coming in on what’s called programmatic advertising, a mysterious, very complex system in the internet that actually sends specific advertisements to different publications, almost nothing was coming in. It was only 1, 2, or 3 percent of the numbers they were expecting. Literally, the advertising agencies themselves couldn’t make head nor tail of it. They did not understand it.

We tried another agency and had the same experience. Eventually, with ad agency number three, we discovered what was going on. 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. For whatever reason, one of them, the Global Disinformation Index, had given us a zero score. They put us on what they refer to as their dynamic exclusion list.

Mr. Jekielek:
The naughty list, clearly.

Mr. Sayers:
Yes. It’s the blacklist. 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 looked at. Everybody is sourced, and there’s nothing dangerous about it.
We investigated and went up through this food chain. You go to an advertising agency and then they go to these distribution platforms. In this case, it was Oracle, the huge technology company, which was started by Larry Ellison. In turn, they use this organization called the Global Disinformation Index to provide ratings on websites.

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 and huge influence. We were really trying to dig into who these people are and how it came about that these organizations have so much influence.

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. Almost by accident they sent an email to Oracle, and that was forwarded down to us. They explained why we had been put on this list.

The answer was that we were, “anti-LGBTQI+,” as they refer to it, on the grounds that we publish, “gender-critical feminists.” This is the fancy term for people who believe there is a biological difference between men and women. In particular, they actually referenced one of our most famous columnists, Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor who has been here at the festival this weekend. She’s a brilliant mind and a brilliant writer and widely read in the UK.

She has been pushing back over the past few years against some of this gender ideology, raising awareness of the potential dangers of transitioning kids when we don’t know enough about it. All of those questions, at least in the UK, have now become pretty mainstream. Literally weeks ago, we had a big government inquiry published called the Cass Review, that has just put a stop to any gender transitioning for minors under age 18.

Mr. Jekielek:
That was a service to the world, not just to the UK. It’s been very valuable for America and Canada.

Mr. Sayers:
In no small measure, it was due to brave voices like Kathleen Stock. Years ago, when this was very hard to speak about, they were considered very controversial. But she was very careful, consistently making the case that this wasn’t thought through, that there wasn’t evidence for it, and it had philosophical problems. She did that in a very brave way.

That has led now to changes in government policy that are, I should also add, popular with the majority of the population. To me, that’s a case study of exactly what good journalism should do. We’ve grandly called this event, Dissident Dialogues. Obviously, we’re not true dissidents in that sense.

In a moment, there will be someone on stage from Iran who is a true dissident and faces real danger. But to be outside the mainstream and ask those difficult questions that the central narrative doesn’t like is exactly what journalists should be doing.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s the heart of journalism.

Mr. Sayers:
I’m extremely proud of what Kathleen Stock was doing, and rightfully, she is too. For whatever reason, this organization, the Global Disinformation Index, thought that publishing her was disinformation. 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. Over the years, that has been watered down.

Now, it has become a very secretive organization due to the huge amount of press attention our expose created. We’ve had members of Parliament and cabinet ministers, along with Elon Musk himself tweeting and messaging about it. There has been a huge amount of public interest in this. But not a peep from the Global Disinformation Index. Complete silence.

Their strategy apparently is to remain hidden in the complexity, and hope that the story goes away. I’m hoping that doesn’t happen, because it’s important that we find out more about them. Since 2018 when they were founded, they have changed their definition of disinformation.

Originally, it was factual inaccuracies that were deliberately put out.
Basically, people lying on purpose is what they used to call disinformation. You can possibly see that there could be a good purpose to have organizations looking out for those clear-cut examples and calling them out. Personally, I don’t think so. I think you would run into problems quite rapidly, even if they were only doing that.

Because as we’ve seen over the last few years, what is officially considered disinformation can quite quickly be revealed to be true. We had examples of this 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 narrative.

Their new software, their algorithms, and their researchers at GDI are now able to identify anything which they consider to be an adversarial narrative. That is, even if something is factually true, if the narrative that it engages in goes against a person or an institution or a scientific endeavor that they think needs protecting, that makes it adversarial, and that makes it disinformation.

Extraordinarily, we have now found ourselves on this blacklist, and it’s 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. It’s very important that we reveal these mechanisms, discover where they are on the internet, and do our best to bring more transparency and common sense to them.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s unusual that you hadn’t encountered this problem up to now.

Mr. Sayers:
We hadn’t run ads before.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is another form of cancellation, but in a more surreptitious way. If you were a media that relies entirely on ads and you get a zero rating, you’re done.

Mr. Sayers:
That’s right. That’s the explicit purpose of this organization—to disrupt and defund what they consider the purveyors of disinformation. Look, we’ve had encounters with YouTube and Facebook, as have many other publications. We’ve had arguments with them over certain videos during Covid that they considered misinformation, but the complaint was subsequently withdrawn by them.

What was new about this was just how hidden it was, and yet how influential. We also discovered the fact that it’s government-funded. When you look at the funding for this organization, the money comes from the United Kingdom government, the foreign office, the State Department via some entities that the State Department has funded, the European Union, the German foreign office, and certain private providers like the Soros Foundation.

This is taxpayer dollars flowing into completely unaccountable, self-created organizations. Although they don’t have the power to completely block content, it’s tantamount to censoring because they can destroy the business model of a publication. I don’t deny that disinformation is an issue. The internet is wide open and all sorts of crazy things are said on it. No doubt, many of them are untrue and people will believe false things.

This is self-evident to anyone who has spent a single day on the internet. The way to combat that cannot be to put government money into these mysterious organizations that take very partisan, subjective definitions of disinformation and quietly apply them with no accountability at all. It’s very hard to defend that as a system.

Mr. Jekielek:
Especially since it’s not transparent and you wouldn’t even know that this is happening. You would wonder, “Why can’t I serve any good ads? Why is my video only going to five people? Surely it’s better than that.” But there’s actually someone putting their finger on the scale.

Mr. Sayers:
This is an issue. I hope we can shine more light on these kinds of entities and do something about them. But the wider problem is the lack of transparency. It actually makes the paranoia worse. 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. They’re worried about division and conspiracy theories.

The one way to make it worse and make more people paranoid and conspiratorial is to actually go around secretly turning off media publishers and paying for it with government money. 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.” I deeply believe this is very counterproductive. If they want to bring people together and restore trust in the media and government, don’t do this.

Mr. Jekielek:
What is the idea behind UnHerd?

Mr. Sayers:
UnHerd means we are away from the herd. We don’t like herd mentality. We have been around for about seven years in the UK. During 2020 to 2021, we really started taking off because we were trying to be a space where you could question some of these orthodoxies and yet do it in a way that is not reactionary. We are not way out there. Ironically, Unherd doesn’t dispense with fact checking, although we’ve just been pointed out as being dangerous.

Mr. Jekielek:
I find your fact checking to be quite rigorous. You have a lot of columnists that have earned my trust.

Mr. Sayers:
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 a lie. There are a lot of websites and publications that basically just pump out the opposite of the mainstream media every day. That is not especially helpful because it just creates a new pole—a new kind of herd, to use our language—which is just like lining up different teams.

We’re trying to consider the issues as real issues. 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 issues. 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. It is pretty much what journalism used to be or should be.

Mr. Jekielek:
How should this work given that there is disinformation? One of the views is that more information is better. But it’s a new world and there are so many different sources of information. There are international players that have malign intent pushing all sorts of information into the system. It’s very difficult to make sense of it all. Have you thought about this?

Mr. Sayers:
I have a few ideas. Number one, let’s make a hard distinction between international and your own citizens. It’s one thing for the government to be saying, “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.” Many citizens would say, “It’s a reasonable job of the government to identify that.”

It’s almost like an international attack. We need to be careful with that as well, because of what we saw with Russiagate. Paranoia around international interventions can also be deployed politically, so we need to be careful with that. For me, that 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. For anything domestic, it should be a way higher bar and people should be very careful about setting up all these entities with these 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 shut after a few weeks. There’s this whole flourishing of these entities. To a lot of people, they sound like the Ministry of Truth and they don’t want them.

We’ve got to be careful domestically. If you’re going to do something that’s either from big corporations or from the government to try and switch off or censor flagrantly incorrect material, you want to have a very transparent process about that, which there isn’t at the moment. If you’re going to sit in judgment on someone’s pronouncement and say that it is incorrect, they need to have a process to appeal it. Everyone needs to see the rationale behind that judgment.

Let’s make it like a mini-court. Then at least there’s a process where people can understand, “Okay, they’re accusing me of this. I can make my argument and then it can be settled.” But the hiddenness of these censorship endeavors make them a lot more sinister.

Then finally, can the marketplace sort this out? Very often the government always thinks, “We’ve got to sort this out. There’s a problem with disinformation. We’re going to fix it.” Often, the marketplace will say, “That’s not going to work.” Then people will come up with their own solutions.

The new Elon Musk Twitter, for example, has these community notes with tags under certain tweets. 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 crowd sourced from other users where they can say, “We question this fact for this reason.”

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 the central government.

But also, if you see a tweet that has a community note you think, “Okay, there’s a claim there and it’s been contested.” You’re made aware that it is a contested claim, you maybe do your own research, and maybe you come to your own view. It is better than having the whole thing hidden from you. I would definitely be in favor of more of those kinds of approaches.

Mr. Jekielek:
One of my favorite UK journalists is Laura Dodsworth. I don’t know if she’s written for UnHerd.

Mr. Sayers:
I know Laura, she’s great.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right. She discovered some years back now the existence of this nudge unit in the UK government. Since then we’ve discovered there’s many nudge units in a lot of governments. The people that are doing this have an attitude that somehow they know better about what people should believe. Have you thought about this?

Mr. Sayers:
That whole nudge phenomenon is very tied up with what we’re talking about. Laura is right to be worried about it. There was this famous book entitled, “Nudge,” by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. We actually interviewed Richard Thaler and put some challenges to him.

We said, “You’ve created this way of thinking where you can subconsciously influence people through clever signposts and signals. Isn’t the net effect that you’re just increasing paranoia and distrust, and that it actually might not even be worth doing?” He didn’t really see it that way. He thought it was just for the health and success of the world.

People from the nudge movement give this example. In the UK, they have overenrolled people into a pension scheme. This is a change in UK policy. Now, when you get your paycheck, instead of you having to choose a pension scheme and buy it, you automatically get enrolled in a pension scheme, and you have to actively choose to leave it. They say that this has been a very effective example of nudging. They’ve gone from 20 percent of people having pensions to 90 percent of people having pensions, which is good for the country.

Mr. Jekielek:
That’s not nudging. That’s making a decision for someone.

Mr. Sayers:
Yes, there’s a real philosophical question about that. On an example like that, there’s a debate to be had. When you reach retirement and you suddenly find that you’ve got this pension that you never thought about, maybe you would be happy. That’s the benign end of nudging, where this is a government policy that is obviously going to be good for people. They say, “Are there ways to make it easier for people to take it up?” Although you could have a proper argument about that, and I would respect people who didn’t like that. You can see their 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 the government is then altered from it being this organization that you elect to serve you through the democratic process into an organization that is proactively trying to influence you all the time. If you don’t like the way they’re influencing you, you then become very paranoid. It changes your whole day-to-day life if you feel you’re being pushed about and nudged all the time.

I feel like the nudge movement has gone way too far and I would like to see a world where governments step back and focus on doing their job for the voters they serve and having fewer proactive ideas about how they can change those voters’ minds.

Mr. Jekielek:
A number of British politicians and Elon Musk got interested in all these questions because of your very wonderfully produced video. You were able to simplify something that is very difficult for people to understand.

Mr. Sayers:
That’s by design, by the way. The complexity is part of their plan.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right. That’s a very good point.

Mr. Sayers:
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 put someone to sleep if you try to explain it. They remain hidden because no one wants to read a long article about online ad technology. Unless you’re in the industry, why would you want to do that? Complexity is fundamentally how those organizations survive.

Mr. Jekielek:
With this issue more broadly, what have the UK politicians been telling you? What do you expect to happen now?

Mr. Sayers:
I gave evidence to a committee in the House of Lords, the upper chamber in the UK, which is like the Senate, and they were really surprised to discover this. They didn’t know about it. Their committee is devoted to the future. It’s like a Senate or a Congressional committee, and they are producing a report which will make recommendations to the government.

I was really pleased to see that there were 14 Lords from the Left wing all the way to the Right wing interviewing me and hearing my testimony. They were all unnerved to discover that this had been going on and that these entities were receiving government money. I think that there will be some additional caution about this.

But 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. We need to be very vigilant about making sure that it doesn’t just come back twice.

Mr. Jekielek:
We have a lot of evidence that these things grew as a reaction to the rise of populism with Brexit and the election of President Donald Trump. This ideological commitment to fighting populism is an element in multiple interviews that I’ve done.

Mr. Sayers:
There’s a tool called Google Trends. 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. 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. Then rising up to 2022 at its peak, it increased 30 times. This concept of disinformation very much dates from 2016 and has just exploded.

Although 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, if we’re trying to be charitable about some of his facts. It made people very anxious.

But really, this was a reaction from a technocratic center about how they should deal with this populist wave. We saw it in the UK with Brexit and then with Trump later in that year. They 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 ask ourselves some difficult questions and change.” That’s the route that I would have liked them to go down. But that didn’t happen. Spoiler alert. That didn’t happen.

The path they took said, “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. We’re going to set up new ways of thinking, such as this disinformation concept that outlaws these questions.”

That means they are really removing a large number of voters out of the normal political sphere where they’re having legitimate opinions, and where you argue them out and either you win or you don’t win in the election. They put this process into this area of expertise where if you disagree with them, it can be called dis or misinformation. They can say that it’s a dangerous opinion that goes against the experts.

You’ve seen a huge amount of issues moving from legitimate political debate into the realm of experts where it can then be protected with these kinds of mechanisms. I think it really backfires. It’s bad for politics. It’s bad for democracy. I wish it hadn’t happened. But unfortunately, that’s where we are.

Mr. Jekielek:
Freddie, as we finish up, is the genie out of the bottle? There’s whole areas of higher education now dedicated to dealing with disinformation. It’s highly funded as we are learning, in all sorts of ways. Since it’s been going on since 2016, is the genie out of the bottle? Are we stuck with these systems now?

Mr. Sayers:
We have to be more optimistic than that. We can look at the success of UnHerd which has grown our audience by more than ten times in the last few years. Conferences like Dissident Dialogue are sold out. This is a successful event in the heart of New York of all places where you wouldn’t necessarily expect lots of people to be questioning these kinds of ideas.

This is proof that in the long term, with the fullness of time, good ideas will prevail. People will not sit there forever and just be told that their opinions are unacceptable. The genie is out of the bottle in the other direction and we should see an leveling up in the years to come.

Mr. Jekielek:
Freddie Sayers, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Sayers:
Thanks for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Freddie Sayers and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.