Excerpt:

I wrote an investigation last week for Tablet looking into Imran Ahmed, a political operative with ties to British intelligence who runs the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a dark money nonprofit that is now attacking the Biden administration’s political opponents. Through one of their board members, Simon Clark, Ahmed’s group has been linked to the Center for American Progress, a think tank and lobby group for corporate Democrats.

I just took a hard look at CCDH’s latest report and discovered something very odd: CCDH never names their researchers. I then dug through past reports and found the same: CCDH’s reports are written by ghosts, anonymous writers who the media then quote as expert “researchers” in news articles.

When you look past the sparkly graphics and apparently alarming conclusions, CCDH reports never report any authors other than Imran Ahmed. Not at the top, nor hidden somewhere in an acknowledgement section. Apparently ghosts wrote the report. The only person named in the document is Imran Ahmed who allegedly wrote the introduction.

“Many think tanks, like RAND or the Urban Institute, as well as other non-profits, almost always credit their authors,” said Joshua Guetzkow, a sociologist and assistant professor in the Faculty of Law at Hebrew Univeristy. Guetzkow has spent several years study the disinformation industry and noted that the Anti-Defamation League notes the names of researchers in an acknowledgement. “The CCDH does not even do that, so it is impossible to know who was involved in the writing and obviously significant amount of research involved in that report.”

The reference section of Ahmed’s “report” looks like high school students threw it together by Googling, during a late night pizza party.

You can see the difference between CCDH and a credible research organization like Pew Research, by looking at the Pew report that Ahmed cites in his own introduction. When you go to that Pew Report “Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022,” you find that Pew lists the authors and provides a biography for each. The first author is Emily Vogels whose Pew biography lists her two research degrees and past reports.

But for Ahmed’s CCDH, the researchers remain hidden. Nonetheless, as soon as Imran Ahmed throws these “reports” on CCDH’s website, they get eaten up by journalists looking for an easy story to bang out with a flashy findings.

“I don't fully understand why some studies gain wide media attention,” Guetzkow said, “But I am certain the process is not organic.”