# Institute for Strategic Dialogue The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) is a London-based think tank that studies extremism, hate and disinformation online. According to its Wikipedia entry, it was founded in 2006 by Sasha Havlicek, now its president and CEO, and the publisher George Weidenfeld. Its U.S. arm, ISD-US, absorbed the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy on January 1, 2026. ## Russia work - **[[Doppelganger]]:** ISD was among the early researchers of the cloned-news-site operation, starting in 2022. When the Justice Department seized 32 Doppelganger domains in September 2024, ISD described the action as targeting the operation at the center of its research. - **[[Operation Overload]]:** ISD's July 2025 review found "no notable organic engagement" on the operation's surviving posts. It is the source for the vault's assessment that Overload mostly fails on its own accounts and gets its reach through others. ## Political pressure - **May 2023:** Reps. Michael McCaul, Brian Mast and Darrell Issa wrote to the Secretary of State seeking documents on federal funding for ISD and similar groups, after a $249,993 State Department grant (as reported by the Washington Free Beacon). - **July 2025:** the House Judiciary Committee under [[Jim Jordan]] sent ISD-US a letter and, by its own account, obtained documents. Its February 2026 staff report, "The Foreign Censorship Threat, Part II," cites them. - **December 2025:** ISD was **not** among the Europeans the State Department barred from the U.S. for allegedly pressuring tech firms to censor Americans. That list included Thierry Breton and leaders of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Global Disinformation Index and HateAid. ISD's name nonetheless recurs in the same "foreign censorship" framing. ## See Also - [[Doppelganger]] - [[Operation Overload]] - [[Clemson Media Forensics Hub]] - [[NewsGuard]] - [[Jim Jordan]] - [[Disinformation Hub]]