A State Department-supported "disinformation" tracking group pressured advertisers to punish websites promoting the COVID-19 "lab leak" theory, which a federal agency now says is the most likely origin of the virus, the Washington Examiner reported.
The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which was focused on creating blacklists of conservative news outlets for advertising companies, applied pressure to those companies to cut ties with websites boosting the once alleged "conspiracy" that COVID-19 emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China.
The Energy Department recently concluded that, based on intelligence, the lab leak was the probable cause.
"GDI is part of [a] disturbing constellation of pop-up censorship organizations that all descended on stifling COVID origins discourse online simultaneously," Mike Benz, director of censorship watchdog Foundation For Freedom Online, told the Examiner.
The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that the Energy Department now says that new intelligence shows the COVID-19 pandemic most likely has been caused by a Wuhan, China, lab leak, something long believed by many Americans but once considered a conspiracy theory even by U.S. public health leaders, including Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The FBI was the first federal agency to determine — with "moderate confidence" — the most likely origin of COVID-19 was through at leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
There remain six other agencies, including a national intelligence panel, still reluctant to back the lab-leak origin. Four continue to believe it was natural in origin, and two others, including the CIA, are undecided, according to the report.
GDI, which compiles a "dynamic exclusion list" intended for advertisers to target conservative websites such as Newsmax and the Examiner, has published several reports on alleged COVID-19 disinformation.
The National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit funded almost fully by the State Department, last week said it was cutting its relationship with a GDI, which is funded by George Soros' Open Society Foundations.
In early 2020, GDI produced a report entitled "Coronavirus: The makings of a disinformation pandemic?" that "adversarial narratives" are emerging as a key "disinformation tactic."
GDI took aim at Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and then-President Donald Trump for suggesting a lab leak started the pandemic.
"By broadcasting the Senator's words to a national audience, this debunked conspiracy theory is given authority, validation and amplification," GDI said after Cotton was interviewed on Fox News in February 2020.
In April 2020, GDI targeted Trump for announcing a government investigation into the lab leak theory. The group claimed that the president "triggered a second wave of conspiracy lab theories on known disinformation sites."
GDI blasted companies for advertising in an article in Canada Free Press that discussed the theory.
"All these lab conspiracy theories have been fact checked and proven untrue," GDI said in its report, which included a link to an article casting doubt on the lab leak theory. "The BBC recently debunked evidence of the Wuhan lab conspiracy by breaking down the timeline of events, the protocols in place to protect researchers and civilians from pathogens, and evaluations of [the] lab in Wuhan by U.S. officials."
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