by Gabe Kaminsky at Washington Examiner
The multinational software company Oracle is cutting ties with the Global Disinformation Index, a State Department-funded group that the Washington Examiner revealed has been secretly blacklisting conservative media outlets.
“After conducting a review, we agree with others in the advertising industry that the services we provide marketers must be in full support of free speech, which is why we are ending our relationship with GDI,” Michael Egbert, vice president for corporate communications at Oracle, said in a statement on Wednesday to the Washington Examiner.
DISINFORMATION INC: MICROSOFT SUSPENDS RELATIONSHIP WITH GROUP BLACKLISTING CONSERVATIVE NEWS
Oracle announced a “collaboration” in 2021 with GDI, which has continued to come under fire from Republican lawmakers in connection to its covert operation of feeding blacklists of conservative websites to advertisers with the intent of shutting down disfavored speech. Egbert declined to comment on whether it has yet notified the British organization, which has two affiliated American nonprofit groups, and whether the action is effective immediately.
“To prevent placements on disinformation sites, brands require a proactive, always-on brand safety approach that helps marketers identify suitable environments while avoiding brand-damaging ones,” Oracle said in August 2021 as part of its prior GDI-related announcement. “Today, we’re proud to announce a collaboration with The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), an independent non-profit that provides trusted, non-partisan ratings to assess a site’s disinformation risk, to help marketers safeguard ad spend and protect brands from inadvertently supporting disinformation sites.”
“Offering an additional layer of brand protection to marketers, GDI’s risk rating analysis powers a new Oracle Contextual Intelligence safety segment for potentially false information,” the statement continued. “Marketers can opt in to use the segment to block the domains categorized as high-risk for disinformation and avoid targeting these sites for ads moving forward.”
The major move comes over two months after Microsoft,…
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