This is part of a Washington Examiner investigative series on self-styled "disinformation" tracking organizations that are secretly blacklisting and taking steps to defund conservative media outlets. Here is where you can read other stories in the series.

Influential left-wing groups have granted millions of dollars to a "disinformation" monitor that has been trying to defund conservative media outlets through secret blacklists, records show.

The Global Disinformation Index, a State Department -backed entity, has been feeding conservative website blacklists to advertising companies, with the intent of shutting down disfavored speech, according to multiple Washington Examiner reports. Several major left-wing organizations linked to powerful donors have steered over $1.7 million between 2018 and 2022 to GDI, according to grant records.

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"The reason it is such a scandal for these 'Big Philanthropy' foundations to be funding domestic censorship is because they aren't just 'Big Philanthropy' foundations," Mike Benz, the State Department's ex-deputy assistant for internal communications and information policy, told the Washington Examiner.

"These same foundations funding GDI to censor domestic opinions at home all work closely with the U.S. State Department, the United States Agency for International Development, and the National Endowment for Democracy to advance foreign policy establishment interests abroad," added Benz, now executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online, a censorship watchdog. "Put another way, 'Big Government' has long had an unspoken relationship with 'Big Philanthropy' to use foundations as a cut-out to undertake political action that would be diplomatically untenable for the U.S. government to be seen doing directly."

The British-based GDI and its two affiliated U.S. nonprofit organizations, the Disinformation Index Foundation and Disinformation Index Inc., have been hauling in cash while urging ad companies to deplatform certain websites. The American entities, which disclose addresses in Texas , pulled in $918,000 combined in 2020 revenue, tax forms show.

GDI's "dynamic exclusion list" contains at least 2,000 websites it deems as disinformation peddlers, according to its CEO, Clare Melford. The Washington Examiner is on this blacklist and, separately, GDI has said the 10 "riskiest" outlets are American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post.

The State Department has granted hundreds of thousands of dollars to GDI, which has fed its blacklist to the Microsoft-owned advertising company Xandr. That company told the Washington Examiner on Saturday that it is now conducting an internal review and, for the time being, not using GDI's services.

One major left-leaning entity that has supported GDI is the Open Society Foundations, which was founded by philanthropist and Democratic megadonor George Soros . In 2022, the group granted $150,000 to GDI for "general support," OSF spokesman Jonathan Kaplan told the Washington Examiner.

The grant has not yet been made public by OSF, noted the spokesman.

Luminate, a nonprofit group founded by eBay chairman Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam Omidyar, granted $800,000 in 2020 to GDI, according to its website. The Omidyar-linked entity was spun off in 2018 from the Omidyar Network Fund, which has funded left-of-center economic regulations, according to the Capital Research Center, an investigative think tank.

The 2020 grant was to "support Global Disinformation Index, which aims to disrupt, defund and down-rank disinformation sites," according to Luminate's database." Two years earlier, in 2018, Luminate also sent $600,000 to GDI to "support technology development of algorithms to calculate probability of misinformation underlying the Global Disinformation Index," records show.

"To fully understand a group’s influence, you always need to look at who is funding it," Robert Stilson, a research assistant for the Capital Research Center, told the Washington Examiner. "In this case, GDI’s funders include some of the most prominent left-of-center philanthropies in the country. Among other things, it begs the question: Is this the sort of thing that people picture when they hear the word ‘philanthropy?’ I doubt it.”

The Tides Foundation, one of the largest liberal grantmakers founded by Democratic activist Drummond Pike, is another GDI supporter. Tides handed $190,000 in 2020 to the Disinformation Index Foundation, according to tax forms. A Long Island, New York , address was listed on tax forms for GDI.

In addition, the Knight Foundation granted $31,200 in 2020 to the Disinformation Index Foundation, records show. The grant was to "support research on how hate speech, misinformation and extremist content is monetized on digital platforms."

The Knight Foundation claims on its website that it "supports the First Amendment and the crucial role in a democracy to inform the community." It has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on journalism initiatives through the years, tax forms show.

In 2019, Knight steered $20 million to the American Journalism Project, which invests in local news outlets and has raked in $4.2 million from the Democracy Fund, an entity Omidyar has supported to fight purported disinformation.

AJP notably partners with the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, which donates to liberal news outlets. In May 2022, AJP hosted an event that explored how a "Black, Indigenous, and People of Color media ecosystem" could allegedly fight disinformation.

On its website, GDI lists two dozen "partners," including Integral Ad Science, an ad verification company worth more than $1.6 billion that hosts an artificial intelligence algorithm to rate perceived disinformation. In turn, IAS partnered in January with another disinformation tracker called DoubleVerify to assist Twitter with a "brand safety" operation, according to a press release.

DoubleVerify, which disclosed $112 million in revenue in November 2022, compiles an "inflammatory news index" for content on websites that promote "blatant opinion statements in non-editorial content," violence incitement, or "the use of slurs when referring to public figures." The Washington Examiner is one outlet that has had content flagged as "inflammatory," according to an ad industry source.

A second source in the advertising space provided the Washington Examiner with what they say is an example of DoubleVerify flagging an article in the outlet as "unsafe."

"DoubleVerify will have different risk 'thresholds' for advertisers," said the source. "The fact that this 'blank' ad showed means that an advertiser ran ads on Examiner (with DoubleVerify technology integrated in their ad buying system), and DoubleVerify blocked their ad from appearing on Examiner, instead showing this brand safety blurb. So whichever advertiser ran this ad (we'll never know) had their DoubleVerify settings to a certain threshold that logged Examiner as 'unsafe,' which prevented their actual ad from appearing."

DoubleVerify has not responded to requests for information on what other websites have had content labeled as "inflammatory."