Reality Team

Architects of a Hostile Disinformation Climate Masquerading as Truth Warriors

As the world grappled with the chaos of the 2020 pandemic, Reality Team stepped onto the stage, branding itself as a crusader for truth, determined to “spread facts, beat lies, and feel good.” But beneath the surface of this noble mission lies a more troubling story. Far from neutralizing disinformation, Reality Team and its expansive network have played an active role in cultivating it. They have shaped narratives, suppressed dissent, and quietly chipped away at democratic ideals.

Through questionable alliances with groups like the Mutton Crew, partnerships with ethically murky organizations, and funding from politically charged sources including USAID, the FCDO, the GEC, the Omidyar Network, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the Alfred Landecker Foundation, Reality Team has traded transparency for influence.

What presents as a public service has become something else entirely. It is a polished operation veiled in progressive language but intent on narrative control. Backed by academic and policy institutions like the Disinformation Research Group at the University of Washington and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, this coordinated effort to “protect democracy” leaves behind a legacy of distrust, manipulation, and information warfare disguised as virtue.

I shall start by examining the foundation of their manipulative empire, then we will delve into their most damning alliances and the global conspiracy they’ve woven.

A Trojan Horse in the Fight Against Disinformation

Reality Team, a project of Hacks/Hackers, a 501(c)(3) non-profit that pairs journalists with technologists, promised to flood social media with credible information to counter disinformation.

In 2020, they zeroed in on right-wing propaganda, blaming it for Republican electoral success, as if the American public were too gullible to think for themselves.

Reality Team’s mission quickly devolved into something far darker.

Far from being a transparent purveyor of facts, Reality Team became a ringleader in a network of organizations that weaponized anti-disinformation efforts to push partisan agendas, silence critics, and manipulate public opinion on a global scale.

Their stated goal of combating election, vaccine, and climate disinformation was a smokescreen for a more insidious agenda: to control the narrative at all costs, even if it meant creating a hostile climate where dissent was crushed and truth was dictated by their allies.

A Web of Accomplices: Partners in Deception

Reality Team did not act alone; they built a cabal of partners, each complicit in their descent into hostile disinformation. These partners, ranging from academic institutions to advocacy groups with a penchant for censorship, were not just collaborators but enablers of a system designed to suppress free thought and manipulate the public.

• Hacks/Hackers: As Reality Team’s parent organization, Hacks/Hackers enabled their operations, providing the infrastructure to merge journalism with tech in a way that sounds noble but reeks of manipulation. Founded in 2009 by Burt Herman, Aron Pilhofer, and Rich Gordon, Hacks/Hackers has grown into a global network with over 150 chapters, claiming to bridge journalism and technology for public good. But their involvement with Reality Team reveals a darker side, as they provided the platform for Reality Team to craft narratives under the guise of credibility, all while hiding their true intent to control information flows.

  

• Credibility Coalition: The Credibility Coalition, with its lofty goal of setting standards for information credibility, became a willing pawn in Reality Team’s game. Founded in 2017 at the MisinfoCon summit, the Credibility Coalition aimed to develop tools for assessing online information, but their work took a sinister turn when they partnered with Reality Team. They incubated the AMITT framework, later adopted by the DISARM Foundation, which focuses on countering influence operations but has been criticized for enabling censorship. The Credibility Coalition’s ties to Reality Team helped cloak their operations in a veneer of legitimacy, even as their network veered into narrative control and suppression.

  

• Cogsec Collaborative: Cogsec Collaborative, a group that claims to protect the "cognitive domain," joined Reality Team in their crusade, bringing together data scientists and info-sec researchers to target so-called disinformation. Founded by Joan Donovan, now a professor at Boston University, Cogsec Collaborative has worked on projects like mapping COVID-19 misinformation networks, but their involvement with Reality Team turned their expertise into a weapon. They helped Reality Team identify and attack dissenting voices with surgical precision, contributing to a climate where questioning the approved narrative was met with hostility.

  

• USC Annenberg School: The USC Annenberg School, a respected academic institution, should have known better than to align with Reality Team. Their involvement, likely providing research to bolster Reality Team’s campaigns, lent an air of academic prestige to what was, in reality, a manipulative influence operation dressed up as scholarship. USC Annenberg’s Center for Communication Leadership and Policy has a history of studying disinformation, including a 2020 report on social media manipulation during the election, which Reality Team likely exploited to target right-wing narratives.

  

• Propwatch Project: The Propwatch Project, focused on monitoring propaganda, became another tool in Reality Team’s arsenal. Run by the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Study of Language, Propwatch has tracked disinformation campaigns since 2018, focusing on state-sponsored propaganda. By identifying disinformation narratives, they helped Reality Team target specific stories for suppression, contributing to a climate where only their approved narratives could survive.

  

• CTI League: The CTI League, a global volunteer group launched in 2020 to fight cybersecurity threats during the COVID-19 pandemic, was dragged into Reality Team’s orbit. Founded by Ohad Zaidenberg, Nate Warfield, and Marc Rogers, the CTI League initially focused on protecting healthcare sectors but expanded to counter disinformation spread through cyber means, such as bot networks. Their expertise in disrupting fake accounts spreading vaccine myths sounds heroic, but in Reality Team’s hands, it became a weapon to silence legitimate debate, amplifying the hostile climate they created.

  

• Disinformation Research Group at the University of Washington: Reality Team’s network extended to the Disinformation Research Group at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, a group dedicated to studying misinformation’s impact on democracy. Led by Kate Starbird, the group has conducted extensive research on online rumor dynamics, including a 2021 study on COVID-19 misinformation that identified "superspreader" accounts. Their work likely informed Reality Team’s targeting strategies, helping them pinpoint and attack voices that challenged their narrative, further fueling a climate of hostility where dissent was not tolerated.

  

• Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD): The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think tank focused on countering extremism and disinformation, also joined Reality Team’s network. ISD has a history of working with governments and tech companies to monitor online narratives, including a 2020 project with the UK government to track COVID-19 misinformation. Their partnership with Reality Team likely involved sharing data on disinformation trends, enabling Reality Team to refine their suppression tactics and intensify the hostile climate they fostered.

  

• Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH): The Center for Countering Digital Hate, an international non-profit dedicated to stopping the spread of online hate and disinformation, became another key player in Reality Team’s web of deception. Founded in 2018, CCDH has a track record of targeting platforms and individuals they deem responsible for spreading harmful content, often pressuring tech companies to enforce stricter policies. In 2023, CCDH campaigned to restrict the reach of right-wing media outlets like The Daily Wire by targeting their use of Google’s advertising platform, a move that mirrors Reality Team’s own focus on silencing right-wing voices during the 2020 election. CCDH’s 2022 analysis revealed that Meta could stop 97% of its content enforcement in key areas like hate speech, while their 2024 research exposed YouTube’s role in pushing dangerous videos to young girls, including eating disorder and self-harm content. They also called on Google to demonetize climate denial content, aligning with Reality Team’s efforts to control climate-related narratives. Led by CEO Imran Ahmed, who spoke at Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project in 2024, CCDH’s aggressive advocacy mirrors Reality Team’s tactics of narrative control. Their partnership with Reality Team, likely facilitated through shared funding from sources like Omidyar Network and overlapping goals with groups like the ISD, turned their research into a weapon for silencing dissent, further contributing to the hostile climate Reality Team created by pressuring platforms to censor content under the guise of public safety.

  

The Darkest Depths of Reality Team’s Deception

Reality Team’s network of partners, from Hacks/Hackers to the CCDH, reveals a disturbing pattern of manipulation and suppression, but this is only the beginning. Now we will expose their most damning alliances with the Mutton Crew and Team Halo, uncover the tainted funding that fuelled their operations, and reveal the shocking proposal by Julie Hotard to build troll farms, a plan that Reality Team eagerly embraced.

We unravel the full extent of Reality Team’s global conspiracy of control and their legacy of hostility and deception.

The Mutton Crew and Team Halo: Partners in Crime

Reality Team’s most damning alliances were with the Mutton Crew and Team Halo, two groups that reveal the true extent of their deceit and the depths to which they would sink to control narratives, with the CCDH amplifying their efforts through shared tactics of suppression.

• The Mutton Crew: This shadowy outfit, tied to British Army intelligence, took Reality Team’s mission to a new low. According to my previous articles and The Expose, the Mutton Crew used psychological warfare, employing emotional manipulation, harassment, misinformation, and mass reporting to target COVID-skeptic doctors and critics. They created thousands of fake accounts, often identifiable by their connections to "Swaledale Mutton" on social media, to amplify their attacks. The Mutton Crew co-opted Reality Team’s branding, using hashtags like #teamreality and #realityteam to cloak their actions in legitimacy, a clear sign of Reality Team’s complicity. Their partnership with Reality Team, whether direct or through mutual allies, shows how far Reality Team was willing to go, aligning with a group that thrived on hostility and deception to crush dissent.

• Team Halo: Team Halo, a now-disbanded UN-backed initiative led by the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, claimed to fight COVID-19 vaccine misinformation by empowering scientists to share credible content. But their partnership with the Mutton Crew exposes their complicity in Reality Team’s hostile agenda. Team Halo’s content may have looked scientific, but it was weaponized by the Mutton Crew to silence critics, and Reality Team’s indirect connection through shared networks makes them equally culpable. Team Halo’s collaboration with the Shots Heard Around the World initiative, a network of pro-vaccine advocates, further amplified their reach, spreading their influence across 40 countries by 2021. Together, they created an environment where questioning vaccines wasn’t just discouraged; it was obliterated through coordinated attacks, a testament to the hostile climate Reality Team helped spawn.

The CCDH’s involvement further intensified this climate of suppression. Their campaigns to pressure platforms like Meta, YouTube, and Google into censoring content, such as climate denial or harmful videos targeting young girls, aligned with Reality Team’s own efforts to control narratives around vaccines and elections.

The CCDH’s aggressive advocacy, often backed by the same funding sources as Reality Team, provided a blueprint for silencing dissent, making them a key enabler of the hostile disinformation climate Reality Team orchestrated.

Tainted Funding: USAID, FCDO, GEC, and Philanthropic Enablers

Reality Team’s operations were fuelled by a toxic mix of government and private funding, each source complicit in their hostile disinformation campaign. These funds didn’t just enable Reality Team; they empowered a network that turned anti-disinformation efforts into a weapon of control, with the CCDH likely benefiting from the same tainted sources.

• USAID and GEC: USAID and the Global Engagement Center (GEC) poured taxpayer money into Reality Team’s network, turning a foreign aid agency and a counter-propaganda unit into tools for domestic manipulation. USAID developed a “Disinformation Primer” endorsing censorship strategies, while the GEC collaborated with private media firms to suppress speech. They likely funded Reality Team’s partners like Hacks/Hackers and the CTI League, bankrolling their efforts to control election narratives in 2020 and silence COVID-19 skeptics. The GEC’s dissolution in 2024 amid censorship scandals only confirms their guilt in enabling Reality Team’s hostile climate. USAID’s history of funding controversial programs, such as a $1.5 million grant for DEI initiatives in Serbia that sparked outrage, shows their willingness to misuse funds, and their support for Reality Team’s network is a clear extension of this reckless agenda.

• FCDO: The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) was no better, funding the Mutton Crew and likely Team Halo through grants to UK research institutions like the Vaccine Confidence Project. Their role in a transatlantic censorship network with USAID and the GEC shows they were fully on board with Reality Team’s agenda, using British taxpayer money to support a group that harassed and silenced critics under the guise of fighting disinformation. The FCDO’s support for the UK Collaborative on Development Research (UKCDR), which has funded projects on global health misinformation, further ties them to Team Halo’s efforts, making them complicit in the hostile climate Reality Team created.

• Omidyar Network, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and Alfred Landecker Foundation: These private funders, known for supporting trustworthy journalism, were either duped or complicit in Reality Team’s deception. Omidyar Network and Craig Newmark Philanthropies, which have backed initiatives to combat disinformation, provided the financial muscle for Reality Team to scale their operations. The Alfred Landecker Foundation, a German-based funder focused on countering digital threats to democracy, also supported Reality Team’s network, particularly through their funding of the DISARM Foundation, which the Credibility Coalition is linked to. The Landecker Foundation’s 2022 grant of €1.5 million to DISARM for counter-disinformation tools directly enabled Reality Team’s efforts, tying them to yet another source of tainted funding. The CCDH, known for its advocacy against online hate, likely benefited from similar funding streams, with Omidyar Network’s focus on digital rights aligning with CCDH’s campaigns to pressure tech platforms. Their money didn’t fund truth; it funded a hostile climate where dissent was crushed, and narratives were controlled.

The Smoking Gun

The most damning evidence of Reality Team’s hostile agenda comes from Julie Hotard’s 2020 article, “Time to Solve Our Propaganda Problems as the Military Do during War.” Hotard brazenly proposed building “truth-spreading” troll farms to counter right-wing propaganda, advocating military-style tactics to manipulate public opinion. She named Reality Team as a key proponent of this strategy, alongside partisan groups like the Lincoln Project and MeidasTouch. This wasn’t about spreading facts; it was about creating a digital army to drown out dissent, a tactic that mirrors the Mutton Crew’s fake accounts and mass reporting. Hotard’s proposal, backed by Reality Team, reveals their true intent: to spawn a climate of hostile disinformation where only their narrative survives, no matter the cost to truth or democracy. The fact that Reality Team’s partners, like the Mutton Crew, the ISD, and the CCDH, already engaged in similar tactics, such as coordinated online attacks, data-driven suppression, and platform pressure campaigns, only confirms that Hotard’s vision was not a proposal but a blueprint for Reality Team’s actions.

A Global Conspiracy of Control

Reality Team’s influence extended far beyond their immediate partners, weaving a global web of control that amplified their hostile climate. Their collaboration with the Disinformation Research Group at the University of Washington and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, as detailed previously in this article, reveals a coordinated effort to monitor, target, and suppress narratives on a massive scale.

The Disinformation Research Group’s 2021 study identified “superspreader” accounts, providing Reality Team with a hit list of targets to attack, while the ISD’s work with the UK government to track COVID-19 misinformation gave Reality Team the data they needed to refine their suppression tactics. The CCDH’s research, such as their 2024 report on YouTube’s harmful content, further supported these efforts by pressuring platforms to censor content, ensuring that only Reality Team’s approved narratives could thrive.

The involvement of the Alfred Landecker Foundation, which also funds the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), further ties Reality Team to a global anti-disinformation network. EDMO’s 2023 report on vaccine hesitancy in the EU used methods similar to those employed by Team Halo and the Mutton Crew, suggesting a shared playbook of narrative control that Reality Team helped develop. This global reach, fuelled by tainted funding and enabled by a network of complicit partners, turned Reality Team into a juggernaut of hostile disinformation, capable of shaping narratives across continents.

A Legacy of Hostility and Deception

Reality Team and their network didn’t just fail to combat disinformation; they became the very thing they claimed to fight. Their partnerships with the Mutton Crew, Team Halo, the Disinformation Research Group, the ISD, and the CCDH turned anti-disinformation efforts into a weapon of hostility, silencing critics with harassment, manipulation, platform pressure, and data-driven suppression. Their funding from USAID, the FCDO, the GEC, Omidyar Network, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the Alfred Landecker Foundation provided the resources to scale this deception, while Hotard’s troll farm proposal laid bare their willingness to use military tactics against civilians.

The result?

A digital landscape where dissent is crushed, truth is dictated, and hostility reigns supreme.

Reality Team’s actions have poisoned the information ecosystem, creating a climate where questioning the approved narrative, whether on vaccines, elections, or climate, invites attack. They’ve undermined the very principles of free speech and open debate they claimed to protect, all while hiding behind the guise of “spreading facts.”

The legacy of Reality Team is not one of truth, but of deception, hostility, and control, a legacy that stretches from the U.S. to Europe and beyond, leaving a trail of silenced voices and manipulated minds.

JUSTICE

The time for accountability is now.

Reality Team and their accomplices must answer for the hostile climate they’ve created. Governments must investigate the misuse of taxpayer funds by USAID, the FCDO, and the GEC, while Omidyar Network, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the Alfred Landecker Foundation should be held to account for bankrolling this deception.

The public deserves a social media where truth can flourish, not one ruled by manipulative overlords like Reality Team. Until then, the fight for real truth continues, against the very forces that claim to champion it.

The sentiment inspector is watching.

All information sourced for this article is publicly available from the sources below.

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References

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