A step-by-step reconstruction of the ISD-to-CCDH targeting operation against GreenMedInfo — from a May 2020 classification list to an August 2026 government-contract paper trail — built entirely from their own documents, their own reporting, and the public record
Story at a Glance
This is not a reframing of an allegation. It is a reconstruction of a sequence of documented, dated, sourced actions — most of them admitted in the operators’ own publications — that ran from classification to deplatforming to White House amplification to dehumanization rhetoric to legal and economic pressure.
An ISD researcher named me, by name, in an ISD-published article five weeks before CCDH’s “Disinformation Dozen” report existed.
The classification that fed the deplatforming didn’t originate with a grassroots watchdog. It originated with a NewsGuard list handed to ISD, cross-referenced against Facebook data pulled via CrowdTangle, and delivered to the BBC for broadcast — a full institutional supply chain, each link documented.
CCDH’s own internal leaked documents, obtained by journalists and cited in a congressional subpoena, describe “killing” a platform as an annual organizational priority — using the same organization, the same tactics, and reportedly the same personnel who built the list that named me in 2020.
This is not a closed case. An independent investigation published five days before this writing puts a $17 million government-contract number on ISD and documents an active federal complaint against CCDH — proof the same institutions are still funded, still active, and now expanding the identical playbook into digital ID and age-verification law in 21 US states.
The Sequence, Reconstructed From Primary Sources
Step 1 — Classification (May 12, 2020)
NewsGuard compiled a list of 34 websites and handed it to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. ISD used CrowdTangle to pull Facebook engagement data on those 34 sites, then partnered with BBC Click to publish “Far-right exploitation of Covid-19.”
GreenMedInfo was number 6 on the list. ISD’s own report claimed the 34 sites generated 80 million Facebook interactions between January and April 2020 — more than the WHO (6.2 million) and CDC (6.4 million) combined — a framing designed to make independent health publishers look more dangerous than the world’s leading public health institutions (GreenMedInfo exposé).
The report stated ISD shared its findings directly with Facebook. Facebook responded that it had removed a number of the flagged links for violating its hate-speech and misinformation policies. Whether that removal was a direct response to ISD’s inquiry or something Facebook had already done, the communication channel itself — a foreign-funded NGO handing a platform a target list and getting a compliance response — is documented in ISD’s own report.
Step 2 — Personal identification, by ISD itself (February 4, 2021)
An ISD researcher — publishing under the institute’s own “Digital Dispatches” banner, in a piece originally run by Wired — wrote in the first person about monitoring “the spread of online disinformation and conspiracy theories” as their “day job” at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. In that piece, the ISD researcher named me directly: “Prominent pandemic deniers include a number of keen yoga practitioners, such as alternative health proponent Sayer Ji, who runs the website greenmedinfo.com, and his wife Kelly Brogan” (ISD, “The yoga world is riddled with anti-vaxxers and QAnon believers,” Feb 4, 2021).
This matters because of the date. This is ISD naming me personally five weeks before CCDH’s “Disinformation Dozen” report existed. The sequence the record shows is not “CCDH built a list independently and ISD later corroborated it.” It is ISD’s own staff researcher, on ISD’s own platform, doing the naming first — consistent with the “older CVE-provenance layer” role ISD occupies as the institutional precursor that CCDH’s 2019-endorsed, newly formed operation then scaled into a public-facing hit list.
Step 3 — The public list (March 24, 2021)
CCDH published “The Disinformation Dozen,” naming twelve individuals — myself included — as collectively responsible for up to 65% of anti-vaccine content on Facebook and Twitter, based on a six-week sample of 483 posts from 30 groups. Sasha Havlicek, ISD’s CEO, had publicly endorsed CCDH in 2019 — a fact GreenMedInfo’s own investigation surfaced directly (GreenMedInfo exposé).
Step 4 — Deplatforming (2021, ongoing)
Following the report, my accounts were removed or restricted across Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Kris Ruby’s December 2022 investigation, based on interviews with a former Twitter data scientist, reported that Twitter’s content-moderation and machine-learning teams took word-list input directly from outside organizations — and when asked to name them, the whistleblower’s answer was: “CDC. Academic Researchers. Center for Countering Digital Hate. FBI. Law Enforcement.”
Step 5 — Executive-branch amplification (July 16–19, 2021)
President Biden told reporters that platforms “are killing people” over vaccine misinformation. Three days later, walking the statement back, he narrowed it to twelve names: “Facebook isn’t killing people — these 12 individuals are disseminating misinformation. Anyone who listens to them is being harmed.” That is CCDH’s Disinformation Dozen framing, verbatim, delivered from the White House lawn (CNN, July 19, 2021; New York Times, July 16, 2021).
Step 6 — Dehumanization rhetoric (2021)
According to GreenMedInfo’s reporting, CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed, in a 2021 podcast interview with journalist Matt Binder, described people on his own list — myself included — as “profiting from causing death” and having a “psychological need … to cause pain and to cause chaos.” Language like this precedes and rhetorically licenses the subsequent economic and legal pressure documented below; describing a private citizen in terms usually reserved for violent extremists is a documented rhetorical strategy, not an incidental quote (GreenMedInfo, “Black Ops Go Digital”).
Step 7 — Legal warfare (2021)
Attorney Brian Rothschild announced plans to file mass tort wrongful-death suits against members of the Disinformation Dozen, arguing that our speech was causally responsible for specific COVID-19 deaths — including citing a firefighter’s death he attributed to “misinformation.” The legal bar for such claims is high and the threat itself functions as intimidation and financial pressure independent of whether any suit could succeed (GreenMedInfo, “Black Ops Go Digital”).
Step 8 — Media weaponization (2022)
Charles Kriel — a figure with documented ties to NATO’s Strategic Communications (StratCom) division and later a Senior Fellow at the UK-based Sympodium Institute of Strategic Communications — co-directed the 2022 documentary Dis/Informed, which frames health-freedom advocates using the language of “radicalisation.” Kriel also advised on the UK’s Online Safety Bill, whose sponsoring committee was chaired by Damien Collins MP — a CCDH UK board member. That is a single individual holding simultaneous roles as a NATO StratCom-linked media producer, a CCDH-adjacent legislative advisor, and a documentary filmmaker whose subject matter targets the same list CCDH produced (GreenMedInfo, “Black Ops Go Digital”).
Step 9 — Institutionalization, confirmed by leak (2024)
Internal CCDH planning documents, leaked to journalists Paul D. Thacker and Matt Taibbi and later cited in a US House Judiciary Committee subpoena letter, list “Kill[ing] [Elon] Musk’s Twitter” as an annual organizational priority, alongside a goal to “trigger EU and UK regulatory action” against the platform and to build a “STAR framework” for an “independent digital regulator” with power to “impose consequences for harmful content.” The same House Judiciary letter states CCDH emailed a Twitter executive in 2020 to identify “groups/accounts/channels” for moderation (House Judiciary Committee letter to CCDH, Nov 7, 2024; UnHerd; RT, citing the Thacker/Taibbi leak).
This is not a new tactic being invented in 2024. It is the same organization’s operating doctrine, now confirmed in its own internal words, four years after it was first applied to health publishers under the “Disinformation Dozen” banner.
Step 10 — The operation, quantified, in real time (August 10, 2026)
This is the part that changes the piece from a historical reconstruction into a live case. An independent investigation with no connection to me or to CHD — Effort’s “The UK’s War on Anonymity Has Come to America”, published five days before this writing — put a government-verified number on the institution that started this chain. Using USAspending records, UK Charity Commission filings, and FARA disclosures, Effort documents that ISD has received over $17 million from the US State Department, the European Union, and UK ministries, including a 2020–2021 US State Department contract explicitly for “monitoring online information operations during COVID-19” — the exact activity that produced the report naming me in May 2020. Effort also documents that CCDH is currently facing an active Foreign Agents Registration Act complaint from America First Legal, and that CCDH’s own 2026 federal lobbying filings show it actively working Section 230 repeal and related legislation right now, not in 2020 or 2021.
Effort’s reporting further shows the network has not disbanded since the Disinformation Dozen era — it has diversified. 5Rights Foundation (founded by a sitting member of the UK House of Lords) and Reset Tech, whose EU affiliate sits inside an ISD-led European Commission consortium, are now running the identical UK-NGO-to-US-legislature playbook against 21 US states and Congress, just with “child safety” and digital ID replacing “health misinformation” as the operative pretext. The mechanism — British-based, foreign-funded organizations importing UK legal architecture into American law under a protective label — is the same mechanism that produced the May 2020 classification, the March 2021 list, and the 2024 “Kill Musk’s Twitter” doctrine. It is simply running today, on a different target, with a bigger budget.
That is the contemporaneity this record was missing: this is not something that happened to health publishers once, in a pandemic, and ended. It is a standing operation, currently funded, currently active, currently expanding into new legislative territory, and as of August 2026 it is being independently priced, sourced, and put on the record by people who owe nothing to me or to CHD.
The Institutional Chain, Not Just the Individuals
Laid end to end, the operational chain looks like this:
No single link in that chain requires speculation. Each one is sourced to either the operators’ own publications (ISD’s site, CCDH’s own report and leaked internal documents) or to independent reporting and a congressional document (CNN, NYT, House Judiciary Committee). What changes when you look at “what they actually did” instead of “what they said their intentions were” is that the pattern stops looking like isolated advocacy organizations doing overlapping work, and starts looking like a supply chain — classification feeds broadcast, broadcast feeds a public list, the list feeds platform enforcement and political amplification, and political amplification licenses the rhetorical, legal, and legislative escalation that followed.
Why the Order Matters
The detail most worth sitting with is the February 2021 date on ISD’s own yoga-world piece. It means the institutional targeting of me by name did not begin with CCDH’s headline-grabbing report — it began five weeks earlier, inside the older, CVE-provenance institution: ISD. CCDH did not discover me. CCDH scaled a target that ISD had already identified and published under its own name.
That is the operational reframe. This was never just a controversial NGO making a claim about me. It was a chain of institutions — a data vendor, a CVE-provenance research institute, a state broadcaster’s collaborative news initiative, a newly formed political nonprofit, several social platforms, the sitting President of the United States, a documentary production apparatus tied to NATO’s strategic communications division, and a set of UK legislators — each performing one function in a sequence. That sequence is now independently documented at every link, and as of this month, it is still running.
Sources
GreenMedInfo, “Exposé: Global Elite Target GreenMedInfo/Health Sites via Institute for Strategic Dialogue, CCDH, NewsGuard, Big Tech” — greenmedinfo.com
Institute for Strategic Dialogue, “The yoga world is riddled with anti-vaxxers and QAnon believers,” Feb 4, 2021 (originally published by Wired) — isdglobal.org
GreenMedInfo, “Black Ops Go Digital: How NATO Operatives Deploy Military Grade PsyOps to Transform Private Citizens into Public Enemies” — greenmedinfo.com
CCDH, “The Disinformation Dozen,” March 24, 2021 — counterhate.com
CNN, “Biden backs away from his claim that Facebook is ‘killing people,’” July 19, 2021 — cnn.com
New York Times, “’They’re Killing People’: Biden Denounces Social Media for Virus Toll,” July 16, 2021 — nytimes.com
US House Judiciary Committee, letter to CCDH re: subpoena follow-up, Nov 7, 2024 — judiciary.house.gov
UnHerd, “Inside the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s plan to ‘kill’ X,” Oct 23, 2024 — unherd.com
RT, “UK lobbyists working with US Democrats to ‘kill Musk’s Twitter’ – leaked files,” Oct 23, 2024 — rt.com
Effort, “The UK’s War on Anonymity Has Come to America,” Aug 10, 2026 — effort.news
I think think the $17 million is owed to the Disinformation Dozen.
This piece is likely to become seminal in the unwinding of these diabolical acts. You have done so much for both our Nation and Humanity at large.
Reading you during the CV Op was such an encouragement as I worked in a company to keep it's staff informed and the business open.
Culture owes you a great debt, Sayer.