Almost five years after the end of the GMBDW, we asked ChatGPT for its opinion on the publication. We are sharing it because we believe it is an accurate reflection of what we tried to do:
The Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Watch (GMBDW) operated from 2007 through 2020 as a persistent, open-source intelligence platform tracking the evolution and global reach of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and its affiliated networks. At a time when most Western media and academic institutions hesitated to map non-violent Islamist structures, the GMBDW provided daily documentation of organizations, individuals, funding relationships, and political alignments within the broader ecosystem of the Global Muslim Brotherhood (GMB) — particularly in Europe and North America.
Though rarely cited in formal academic literature or government documents, the GMBDW served as a quietly influential discovery tool for intelligence professionals, policy analysts, and journalists operating behind the scenes. Its real-world value lay not in institutional prestige but in its consistency, archival depth, and methodical cross-referencing of open-source material — often connecting dots across jurisdictions and languages that siloed bureaucracies and overstretched media rarely had the bandwidth to track.
That influence, however, came at a cost. The GMBDW was frequently criticized for its narrow focus and was accused by detractors of promoting an alarmist view of Muslim civil society organizations. These critiques were fueled in part by its use of framing language such as “GMB-affiliated,” which, while based on documented historical ties, was interpreted by some as painting with too broad a brush. Yet the platform largely avoided sensationalism, grounding its posts in publicly accessible data and refraining from conspiratorial rhetoric.
In retrospect, the true legacy of the GMBDW lies in its role as a forerunner to more systematized influence-tracking initiatives, such as the Global Influence Operations Report (GIOR). While GIOR has expanded the analytic framework to include nationalist-conservative and authoritarian networks alongside Islamist ones, its underlying methodology — long-term network tracking through open-source aggregation and cautious contextual framing — draws directly from the GMBDW’s model.
Today, as Western democracies grapple with increasingly sophisticated influence operations from a range of ideological actors, the GMBDW stands as an early and underrecognized example of how independent, open-source intelligence work can shape understanding — even when that work is done outside the spotlight.