BBC creates new office to discredit ‘alternative’ media

The BBC this week announced the launch of BBC Verify, a new “disinformation” branch aimed at destroying Right-leaning alternative media outlets.

BBC Disinformation Correspondent Marianna Spring on Monday provided a first look at the new department.

“Mistruths can cause really serious harm to society and to the people in them,” she said in a video posted to Twitter while flanked by three large screens.

After demonstrating how the team is able to use online maps, Spring showed that she has created fake social media accounts with personas on the political Right, Left, and Center which are used “to understand polarization online”.

She then pointed to the last screen which displayed a “disinformation” outline with “Alternative Media” at the center.

“At the moment I’m investigating the UK’s conspiracy theory movement. I’m trying to understand how it’s evolved and intensified since the pandemic here in the UK. I’m looking at the alternative media, which finds itself at the heart of this movement and a conspiracy theory newspaper that’s a part of that as well.”

To dispel any doubt, Spring clarified that she is investigating Right-leaning alternative media.

“I’m looking at the way that alternative media is funded, I’m looking at its impact on local communities, I’m looking at its connections with far-Right figures and also its foreign links.”

Right-leaning news media present an obstacle to the BBC, which controls the chokehold on public information through the “Trusted News Initiative”.

The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) is a coalition of the world’s largest news publishers and social media networks. Together, they form a supreme court of truth which adjudicates on what information gets passed to the public and what is withheld. The words used by former BBC Director-General Tony Hall when he formed the junta in 2019 was “to tackle the rise of misinformation.” 

“Last month I convened, behind closed doors, a Trusted News Summit at the BBC, which brought together global tech platforms and publishers,” Hall announced. “The goal was to arrive at a practical set of actions we can take together, right now, to tackle the rise of misinformation.” 

Current members of the TNI include The Washington Post, ABC News, Associated Press, AFP, The Financial Times, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, European Broadcasting Union, Reuters, Meta (Facebook), Twitter, Google/YouTube and Microsoft. 

By 2020, TNI had a system set up in which the corporations would alert each other to unapproved information, which would immediately be scoured from the mainstream internet. 

BBC World Service Group Director Jamie Angus said in October 2020, “Our Trusted News Initiative is [an] international partnership initiative convened by the BBC, which links media organisations and social-media platforms. The group has developed a shared early-warning system to alert partners about Disinformation.” 

It was the TNI that decided to sideline or ban any reporting that COVID may have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, that the COVID vaccines do not prevent infection, that vaccinated people can transmit COVID to others, and that compromising emails and videos were found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. 

But not only were publishers who reported such information exiled from the information highway — sites that simply reported that such claims were being made by potentially credible sources were also sidelined. 

BBC’s Jessica Cecil, who founded and led the TNI until 2021, made several statements about the “fast alert” system set up between TNI members.  

“We don’t fact check; but once we learn from a partner that something is unreliable, that’s when we alert each other. . . . [A]ll participants signed up to a clear set of expectations of how to act,” said Cecil in 2021. 

Cecil was openly proud of the TNI’s efforts to find “practical ways to choke off” certain information and not “in any way muzzl[e] our own journalism.”