Washington Post Uncritically Publishes Far-Left Org’s Attack on Breitbart, Conservative Media, Facebook

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a far-left British think tank dedicated to pushing internet censorship, has attempted to frame Breitbart News as the leading pusher of “climate change denial” on Facebook, only to be shot down by Facebook itself over its “flawed” methodology.

The CCDH is tied to Hope Not Hate, an SPLC-like smear factory funded by George Soros. It also received funding from the Oak Foundation, a Switzerland-based eco-investment group that contributed $1 million to an initiative to make communist China’s Eurasia-spanning trade network, the Belt and Road initiative, more eco-friendly.

The biased conclusions of CCDH were published by the Bezos-owned Washington Post’s Cat Zakrzewski, uncritically, without any background on the organization’s far-left bent and ties to an organization supporting China’s bid for global dominance.

Beyond a skeptical comment from Facebook, there is also no attempt to interrogate the report’s methodology, which labels criticism of the Green New Deal as “climate denial.”

The report also attacks other conservative media for alleged “climate denial,” including the Media Research Center, Western Journal, the Washington Times, the Daily Wire, Newsmax, and Townhall.

Media Research Center president Brent Bozell slammed CCDH as “digital brownshirts” over the pro-censorship report.

“These anti-free speech bigots want to shut down anyone who dares to disagree with them.”

This is the latest component in a wider effort on the part of leftists inside and outside Facebook to have Breitbart News blacklisted by the social network.

The last attempt involved selective leaks to the Wall Street Journal from inside the company. It is unclear if the efforts are being coordinated.

The CCDH study, shared with the Washington Post, alleges that Breitbart News is the most influential of ten publishers on Facebook that publishes “climate change denial content” — and then goes on to claim that a writeup of a radio interviewee criticizing far-left congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” is “climate change denial.”

The CCDH’s methodology is so bad, even Facebook spokesman Andy Stone, a former Democrat party operative, criticized it.

Via the Washington Post:

In a statement, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone called the methodology “flawed,” arguing that the study represents just 0.3 percent of the “over 200 million interactions on English public climate change content from Pages and public groups over the same time period.”

Facebook similarly pushed back on the structure of CCDH’s disinformation dozen report, arguing it was based on “narrow data” that wasn’t representative of the hundreds of millions of posts that people shared about coronavirus vaccines on Facebook.

The CCDH, a British nonprofit founded in 2018, is increasingly notorious for its campaigns to censor conservative and alternative media outlets.

As Breitbart News has previously reported, the organization is linked to the British Labour party, members of the British government, and Hope Not Hate, a British far-left campaigning group backed by George Soros and tied to violent left-wing extremists.

In his New York Times bestselling book, Breaking The News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption, Breitbart News editor-in-chief Alex Marlow describes how CCDH collaborated with the left-wing establishment media to have the Federalist, a prominent conservative publication, removed from Google Ads:

Via Breaking The News: 

Sometimes NBC’s activism gets a little more overt. In June 2020, NBC News reporter Adele-Momoko Fraser reported that ZeroHedge, a popular financial news blog with a libertarian political bent, and the Federalist, a moderate conservative opinion website that features pro-Trump content, would no longer be able to generate revenue from Google Ads. Fraser worked at the time for something called the “NBC News Verification Center” (even Orwell might have said that name is too on-the-nose).

The most stunning part of this saga wasn’t that a big establishment outlet had exaggerated claims in a negative story about smaller right-of-center outlets; it was that the reporter thanked far-left activists for “collaborating” on it. Fraser tweeted upon publication of the mostly fake news article, “Thanks to @SFFakeNews and @CCDHate for their hard work and collaboration!” @SFFakeNews is the handle for a project called Stop Funding Fake News (ironic!) by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (@CCDHate). Stop Funding Fake News is a card-carrying member of the conspiratorial far left. For example, they’ve suggested that brands like Ford and Microsoft “fund racism.” 94 Stop Funding Fake News, a British advocacy group, smears Breitbart on its website and openly advocates that we should be “defunded.”

The CCDH was also involved in pressuring Twitter to blacklist popular British conservative pundit Katie Hopkins.

Already tied to the British government and its left-wing opposition, the Labour Party, CCDH is also building its influence with the Biden administration.

Joe Biden used a previous CCDH study to accuse Facebook of “killing people” with “misinformation,” part of a wider effort to force the social network — which has already censored Donald Trump, a wide variety of conservative influencers, and media outlets — to further censor more conservative media.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.