Global Disinformation Index – Public Launch of Report & Results for Canada

1-2.30pm EST / 10-11.30am PST

Register here for the launch event for this highly anticipated event. News websites have financial incentives to spread disinformation, in order to increase their online traffic and, ultimately, their advertising revenue. Meanwhile, the dissemination of disinformation has disruptive and impactful consequences. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a recent example. By disrupting society’s shared sense of accepted facts, these narratives undermine public health, safety and government responses.

To combat ad-funded disinformation, the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) deploys its assessment framework to rate news domains’ risk of disinforming their readers. These independent, trusted and neutral ratings are used by advertisers, ad tech companies and platforms, to redirect their online ad spending in line with their brand safety and disinformation risk mitigation strategies.

GDI defines disinformation as ‘adversarial narratives that create real world harm’, and the GDI risk rating provides information about a range of indicators related to the risk that a given news website will disinform its readers by spreading these adversarial narratives. These indicators are grouped under the index’s Content and Operations pillars, which respectively measure the quality and reliability of a site’s content and its operational and editorial integrity.

The launch event will see panelists discuss the findings of the research, and discuss the impacts of those findings, before taking Q&A from the audience: