The Grayzone

The Grayzone is an American fringe,[7] far-left[19] news website and blog,[23] founded and edited by American journalist Max Blumenthal.[20]

The Grayzone
The homepage of The Grayzone on September 11, 2021
Type of site
News website, Blog
Founder(s)Max Blumenthal
EditorWyatt Reed (managing)[1]
Key peopleBen Norton (until January 2022)
Aaron Maté
Anya Parampil
Alex Rubenstein
Kit Klarenberg
URLthegrayzone.com
LaunchedDecember 2015

The website, initially founded as The Grayzone Project,[24] was affiliated with AlterNet before becoming independent in early 2018.[4] It is known for its critical coverage of the US and its foreign policy,[1] misleading reporting,[25][26] and sympathetic coverage of authoritarian regimes.[4][21][27][28] The Grayzone has downplayed or denied the Chinese government's human rights abuses against Uyghurs,[32] published conspiracy theories about Venezuela, Xinjiang, Syria, and other regions,[33][34] and published pro-Russian propaganda during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[31]

Grayzone writers such as Blumenthal and Aaron Maté acted as briefers on behalf of the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations at UN meetings organised by Russia.[35][36][37][38]

History

The Grayzone was founded as a blog called The Grayzone Project in December 2015 by Max Blumenthal.[4][20][24] The blog was hosted on AlterNet from its inception until early 2018, when The Grayzone became independent of the website.[4][39]

Amid the Syrian civil war, the website supported the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria,[26] published content denying that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against civilians,[28][40][41][42] and accused the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) of a "cover-up".[43] The website also downplayed the scope of China's Xinjiang internment camps and other widely reported abuses by the Chinese government against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities.[3][4][20][21][28] Blumenthal stated in July 2020 "I don’t have reason to doubt that there’s something going in Xinjiang, that there could even be repression. But we haven’t seen the evidence for these massive claims".[4]

Research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), which studied 28 social media accounts, individuals, outlets and organisations, stated that Grayzone reporter Aaron Maté was the "most prolific spreader of disinformation" on matters concerning Syria amongst its study group, having surpassed Vanessa Beeley in 2020.[44][45]

When a humanitarian aid convoy on the border of Venezuela caught fire in February 2019, The Grayzone published an article by Blumenthal in which he argued that the U.S. government and mainstream media had falsely reported forces supporting President Nicolás Maduro as the individuals responsible for sparking the flames, writing that "the claim was absurd on its face." Glenn Greenwald, writing in The Intercept, commented that the story "compiled substantial evidence strongly suggesting that the trucks were set ablaze by anti-Maduro protesters".[46]

English Wikipedia formally deprecated the use of The Grayzone as a source for facts in its articles in March 2020, citing issues with the website's factual reliability.[4][22]

The Grayzone promoted the Nicaraguan government's narrative on the 2018–2022 Nicaraguan protests and the November 2021 Nicaraguan general election.[6][47][24] The platform also conducted an "unquestioning interview", according to The Guardian, with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.[48][49] Blumenthal and Norton expressed their support to the regime dancing to "El Comandante se queda" (English: The Comandante Stays) a cumbia song composed in support of Ortega during the 2018 protests.[49] The Grayzone published an open letter, promoted by RT, criticizing The Guardian's coverage of Nicaragua and one of its contributors, Carl David Goette-Luciak. Goette-Luciak was later arrested and deported by the Nicaraguan government. John Perry, writing under the pseudonym Charles Redvers, published a "confession" on The Grayzone of student protester Valeska Sandoval.[24] The confession was false and Sandoval made it under duress while in prison.[6][24][47]

In February 2021, tweets concerning a Grayzone article by Blumenthal were the first to receive a Twitter warning label stating "These materials may have been obtained through hacking". The story was titled "Reuters, BBC, and Bellingcat participated in covert UK Foreign Office–funded programs to 'weaken Russia', leaked docs reveal". The story referred to hacked and leaked documents and alleged that a British Army unit has used "social media to help fight wars".[50][51]

Amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the website has published disinformation, including the debunked claim that Ukrainian fighters were using civilians as human shields, and that the 2022 Mariupol theatre bombing was staged by the Azov Regiment to warrant NATO intervention.[31] The Grayzone's invitation to the 2022 Web Summit, the largest technology conference in Europe, was withdrawn over backlash against the website's anti-Ukrainian narratives amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[11][52][53] After the documentary Navalny won an Academy Award in February 2023, The Grayzone published an article by Lucy Komisar criticizing the film. The article was shown to be written by the neural network Writesonic and to reference sources that did not exist.[54][55][56][57]

Funding

Blumenthal has stated that The Grayzone receives funding through Patreon and from "private friends of mine who are basically progressive Americans who support progressive media". He said The Grayzone receives no state funding from Russia or China.[58]

In August 2023, GoFundMe froze more than $90,000 from 1,100 contributors to The Grayzone, citing unspecified "external concerns". Blumenthal said he believed the concerns were political and related to the platform's coverage of the war in Ukraine. The Grayzone's managing editor Wyatt Reed had also had issues with PayPal and Venmo since reporting on Ukraine.[1]

Reception

The Grayzone's news content is generally considered to be fringe[3][4][5][6] and the website maintains a pro-Kremlin editorial line,[26][59] centred around an opposition to the foreign policy of the United States and a desire for a multipolar world.[4]

The Grayzone has been criticized for defending authoritarian regimes.[4][20][34][39][60] In Reorienting Hong Kong’s Resistance: Leftism, Decoloniality, and Internationalism, The Grayzone was described as "known for misleading reporting in the service of authoritarian states".[25] Nerma Jelacic, writing in the Index on Censorship, described The Grayzone as "a Kremlin-connected online outlet that pushes pro-Russian conspiracy theories and genocide denial."[61] In 2019, The Grayzone had claimed the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, of which Jelacic is a director, collaborated with ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra affiliates.[61]

It has also been sharply criticized for de-emphasizing the scale of the Xinjiang internment camps and other Chinese state abuses against Uyghurs.[4][20][62]

The Russian fake news website Peace Data has republished articles by The Grayzone in order to build a reputation as a progressive and anti-Western media source and to attract contributors.[63] False claims published by The Grayzone are referenced by many Twitter users who back Assad and the Russian government.[26]

The government of China, officials within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Chinese state media have viewed The Grayzone's coverage of China positively.[3][4][20][21] The site has promoted Chinese Communist Party narratives on Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.[64] In order to dispute accusations of ongoing atrocities in Xinjiang, Chinese state media and Chinese officials have increasingly cited posts from The Grayzone in their public communications.[67] According to a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Chinese state-controlled media and affiliated entities began to amplify articles from The Grayzone in December 2019 after the website posted an article critical of Xinjiang researcher Adrian Zenz.[3] Chinese state-controlled media cited The Grayzone at least 313 times between December 2019 and February 2021, 252 of which were in English-language publications, the report said.[3][29]

See also

References
  1. Hale, Erin (September 1, 2023). "GoFundMe freezes donations for The Grayzone, sparking free speech debate". Al Jazeera. Archived from the original on September 1, 2023. Retrieved September 2, 2023.
  2. Casalicchio, Emilio (August 28, 2022). "How a retired MI6 boss, his Brexiteer friends and a celebrity Marxist became targets in Russia's war on Ukraine". POLITICO. Archived from the original on November 4, 2022. Retrieved November 4, 2022.
  3. Zhang, Albert; Wallis, Jacob; and Meers, Zoe. (March 2021) Strange bedfellows on Xinjiang: The CCP, fringe media and US social media platforms. Archived September 12, 2021, at the Wayback Machine Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
  4. Thompson, Caitlin (July 30, 2020). "Enter the Grayzone: fringe leftists deny the scale of China's Uyghur oppression". Coda Story. Archived from the original on October 19, 2021. Retrieved September 12, 2021. The Grayzone has followed a similar path on Syria, challenging reports of atrocities by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. ...Based on a desire for a multipolar world, in which global military, cultural and economic power is distributed among multiple nation states and Western influence greatly diminished, they have been quick to argue on behalf of authoritarian regimes such as China and Syria.
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  19. Considered far-left by numerous sources.[1][4][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]
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  26. Fiorella, Giancarlo; Godart, Charlotte; Waters, Nick (July 14, 2021). "Digital Integrity: Exploring Digital Evidence Vulnerabilities and Mitigation Strategies for Open Source Researchers". Journal of International Criminal Justice. Oxford University Press. 19 (1): 147–161. doi:10.1093/jicj/mqab022. ISSN 1478-1387. Archived from the original on November 5, 2021. Retrieved April 6, 2022. These grassroots communities are particularly evident on Twitter, where they coalesce around individual personalities like right-wing activist Andy Ngo, and around platforms with uncritical pro-Kremlin and pro-Assad editorial lines, like The Grayzone and MintPress News. These personalities and associated outlets act as both producers of counterfactual theories, as well as hubs around which individuals with similar beliefs rally. The damage that these ecosystems and the theories that they spawn can inflict on digital evidence is not based on the quality of the dis/misinformation that they produce but rather on the quantity.
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