The UK Campaign to Cancel Right-Wing Media Outlets

An interesting story appeared today on Ryan Grim’s Substack site. The story isn’t his but is adapted form a book that just came out by Paul Holden. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Holden before today. Best I can tell, he is another leftist (like Ryan Grim) and his big picture view is that Democratic Socialist Jeremy Corbyn was unfairly taken down by a cabal of pro-Israel donors and fake claims of anti-Semitism, all to make way for the more moderate Keir Starmer.

I just want to state up front that I don’t agree with his take at all. There really was a problem with anti-Semitism in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn and when pressed by a skilled interviewer even Corbyn couldn’t deny it. More generally, if there was a cabal of people within Labour working to take down Jeremy Corbyn I’m glad they succeeded. Not just because he seemed willing to tolerate anti-Semitic outbursts but because I’m always happy to see socialists fail.

That said, some of what Holden has to say about attempts to cancel right-leaning US-based news outlets is pretty interesting.

As Keir Starmer rose to power in Britain, the political machine responsible for his rise ran a behind-the-scenes campaign to demonetize the U.S. news outlet Breitbart. The attacks on Breitbart were part of a targeted campaign against media outlets on both the left and right considered hostile to the centrist faction of the Labour Party, according to a trove of documents that expose the operation…

The project was run through an organization called Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). SFFN was incubated and resourced by a think-tank called Labour Together under the guise of fighting misinformation and “fake news.” Between 2018 and 2020, the anodyne-seeming think-tank received £739,000 in donations that it failed to report to the UK Electoral Commission, in violation of electoral law. Labour Together was found guilty and fined in September 2021 for the offense.

Morgan McSweeney, now Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, was Labour Together’s company secretary during this period. He also listed himself on LinkedIn as Labour Together’s “Managing Director.”…

Before it was unmasked as a partisan political project, SFFN claimed to be organized by an anonymous group of concerned citizens who were inspired by a project in the United States called Sleeping Giants, a demonetizing campaign launched against Breitbart by workers in the U.S. tech industry in 2016.

It may have started with Breitbart but it didn’t end there. A spinoff of SFFN called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) targeted a bunch of right-leaning sites.

That campaign directly sought to “cancel” outlets reporting favorably on Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party. It also made several ad-hominem attacks on U.S. President Donald Trump personally and sought to ensure that Breitbart was barred from receiving any advertising at all from the UK’s Cabinet office…

SFFN encouraged advertisers generally to block their ads from appearing on Breitbart’s YouTube content. In order to scale up its demonetization campaign, SFFN hosted an excel spreadsheet “blocklist” on its website for years. It listed the URLs of “fake news” websites that advertisers could import into their Google AdSense profiles to block sites en masse from receiving their advertising. This included Breitbart and a host of other alt-right and conservative U.S. sites such as Zero Hedge, The Federalist and American Thinker from 2020 onwards, alongside The Canary and Evolve Politics. SFFN also provided a handy “how-to” guide for advertisers and brands, walking them through how they could add SFFN’s targets to their own personalised blocklist. By December 2020, the list had expanded to include 28 sites, including two platforms linked to the far-right British agitator, Tommy Robinson, most notably Rebel News.

With the exception of the UK site The Canary, all of these sites survived. But obviously British politicians had no business targeting sites which are primarily focused on US politics.

If all of this is verified the connection to Keir Starmer’s chief of staff seems like it won’t help Starmer’s popularity much. But as Holden notes, it might help Nigel Farage whose Reform UK party is on track to sweep away Labour in the next election. Labour is currently at about 17% in polling while Reform UK is ten points higher. The election will take place next May.

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