Why I don’t trust the BBC’s Trusted News Initiative

You almost certainly haven’t heard of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), although you probably should have. It’s a BBC-led consortium of the world’s most powerful news, social media and technology companies that seeks to cleanse the internet of ‘disinformation’. It carries out this mission by doing its best to discredit sites that challenge the prevailing narrative on topics like lockdowns, Covid vaccines, electoral fraud, the Ukraine war and climate change. It was founded in 2019 by Jessica Cecil, a senior BBC executive who, in 2021, was part of the Counter Disinformation Policy Forum, a shadowy group of ‘experts’ convened by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to monitor criticism of the government’s pandemic response.

The TNI is currently embroiled in an anti-trust lawsuit in the US brought by various independent news publishers who have accused the BBC, Reuters, which Washington Post and the New York Times, among others, of conspiring with their TNI partners – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and Microsoft – to suppress heretical content using techniques such as shadow-banning, de–platforming and manipulating search results.