The Trusted News Initiative
A useful alliance to fight dangerous disinformation? Or a means of Global Information Control?
https://unexpectedturns.substack.com/p/the-trusted-news-initiativehttps://unexpectedturns.substack.com/p/the-trusted-news-initiativeI thought it worth highlighting the Trusted New Initiative (TNI) which was formed in September 2019.
The official view
According to this BBC website…
The Trusted News Initiative is a unique global partnership bringing together organisations across media and technology to tackle harmful disinformation in real time. The partnership focuses on moments of potential jeopardy, that could threaten life or the integrity of democracy, particularly during elections.
Partners alert each other to high risk disinformation so that content can be reviewed promptly by platforms, whilst publishers ensure they don’t unwittingly share dangerous falsehoods.
In the words of BBC Director-General Tim Davie:
I think it’s critical to work with other partners such as the Trusted News Initiative. The whole topic can be pretty daunting when you see the scale of change going on. This is a moment when we need a coalition of the willing and together with partners we can create scale and some standards and systems to fight disinformation.
That is how the BBC presents The Trusted News Initiative.
By way of note, here is the BBC’s “first specialist disinformation and social media correspondent” Marianna Spring, who (according to Wikipedia) graduated from Oxford in the last 2010s with a degree in French and Russian:
And here is an extract from a 2023 Telegraph article, based on a report published in The New European:
Ms Spring embellished her CV when applying for a job as a Moscow stringer [i.e. part-time or freelance correspondent] for a US news site in 2018.
She reportedly applied to Coda Story saying that she had worked alongside Sarah Rainsford, a BBC foreign correspondent, for the broadcaster’s coverage of the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
Natalia Antelava, Coda Story’s editor-in-chief, checked the claim and discovered that the young journalist had only met Ms Rainsford in a few social situations, rather than having worked with her.
Ms Spring was then reported to have then sent an apology email to the editor, citing her own “awful misjudgement” and assuring her that she was “a brilliant reporter”.
“I’ve only bumped into Sarah whilst she’s working and chatted to her at various points, but nothing more. Everything else on my CV is entirely true,” she emailed.
In a response also seen by The New European, Ms Antelava responded: “Telling me you are a brilliant reporter who exercises integrity and honesty when you have literally demonstrated the opposite was a terrible idea… I am sure if you use this as a lesson, things will work out.”
Hmm.
Another perspective
For another view of the Trusted News Initiative, consider this four-minute video from November 2021 (transcript and snapshots below):
(NB the video is presented from a US perspective)
What is the Trusted News Initiative or TNI? Simply: Global Information Control.
The Trusted News Initiative was founded in 2019 by UK state broadcaster the BBC and its global media and Big Tech partners.
The TNI claimed its first order of business was to promote freedom and democracy by preventing interference in the 2020 US Presidential Election.
But there was more.
The TNI’s Big Pharma backers had a vaccine agenda in mind from the start. The TNI issued a warning in 2019 that anti-vaxxers were gaining traction across the internet, requiring “algorithmic intervention”. That means very smart computer programs to identify, attack and neutralise “anti-vaccine content”.
How does the TNI work? Flooding your screen with repetitive pro-vaccine messages that normalise the experimental [covid] vaccine. They demonise the unvaccinated to create division and drive public acceptance of vaccine compliance.
The TNI also pays off so-called “fact-checkers” to run false fact-checks and hit pieces on scientists and journalists who buck the official narrative
Hundreds of frontline medical professionals, scientists [and] researchers who dare to speak out about the official narrative… gone, disappeared from social media by the TNI.
They didn’t ask approved questions. They didn’t come to approved conclusions. So now top doctors from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford are “dangerous” experts who must be neutralised.
TNI director Jessica Cecil complains that “Anti-vax content often includes interviews with people who have medical degrees. There is frequently a grain of truth to what is claimed. That makes untangling… the false hard.”
[The TNI attacks] early treatments that cure covid, because they feel it poses a threat to the vaccine agenda. The TNI network also ignores stories of tens of thousands that been injured by covid vaccines, in order to promote the false narrative that they are safe and effective. It’s not just careers the TNI is destroying but real lives as it suppresses the true numbers of vaccine adverse effects and early treatment protocols.
Who is paying for this harmful suppression of science? You are. We are. We pay taxes. The government pays Big Pharma, and Big Pharma spends almost $7 billion advertising with TNI corporations.
TNI companies also have pharma investments, massive conflicts of interest. See how that works?
It is important not to underestimate the extent of this.
And at the beginning of the pandemic when it mattered, when the truth could have helped science find the origin of covid, the TNI aggressively shut down all inquiry into this. They called scientists, who simply raised the question of virus origin as a leak from the Wuhan lab, conspiracy theorists. A year later, the so-called “conspiracy theory” has been deemed the most most plausible scenario.
Remember Orwell’s dystopian 1984?
The ministry of peace made war.
The ministry of love tortured.
The ministry of truth told lies.
And in 2021 the Trusted News Initiative promotes disinformation while keeping the true science from us.
[Multiple voices overlaid] The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. More alarmingly, some media outlets publish things that simply aren’t true without checking facts first. Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
It seems that the Trusted News Initiative was still going in 2023. But at the time of writing there were no 2024 updates on that website.
Five years after the Trusted News Initiative was established, we may reasonably ask:
Has the TNI been a useful alliance to fight dangerous disinformation? Or a means of Global Information Control?
Judge for yourself. But not before looking carefully beyond the mainstream media first.