The most effective way to combat misinformation is to try to ensure that the websites that spread it receive less advertising revenue. That is the conclusion he reaches a study published today in the journal Nature after analyzing 1,276 disinformation websites and 4,209 legitimate websites between 2019 and 2021, as well as the behavior of 42,595 unique advertisers with more than 9.5 million advertising impacts in that period.
According to the authors of the work, making consumers know where companies invest their advertising budget can result in a considerable cut in the amount dedicated to websites that spread lies. There are brands that do not want to be associated with this type of content, but often finance them due to ignorance: they use automatic programmatic digital advertising tools, in which they auction in real time which banners on which computers they want to appear on.
The problem is that these auction spaces, organized by the so-called ad exchanges, not only include media outlets of proven reputation, but some have disinformation websites in their catalog. “Some advertisers are not aware of where their money is going,” Wajeehaa Ahmad of the Department of Management Sciences and Engineering at Sanford University and his colleagues say in the article.
Follow the money trail
The study confirms, firstly, that online disinformation is financed mainly by advertising revenue and, secondly, that the automation of the allocation of advertising space amplifies the financing of disinformation. Next, it examines how the fact of financing these websites affects advertisers and, finally, proposes measures to reduce that investment, which, according to NewsGuard, is not minor: for every $2.16 of digital advertising revenue in legitimate media, the American advertisers spend a dollar on disinformation websites.
The approach of this work is innovative because, until now, most interventions to try to counteract the proliferation of misinformation focus on the consumer side: developing fact-checking websites, labeling responsible content, asking readers not to spread content they don’t trust, etc. The goal of Amad and his colleagues was to act on the supply side.
To identify the websites where disinformation is served, the researchers turned to two main sources: NewsGuarda company that rates the reliability of the information contained in 95% of the websites available in the five countries in which it operates, and at Global Disinformation Index (GDI). The study considers a website to be disinformation when NewsGuard has repeatedly classified it as such between 2019 and 2021.
The first thing was to try to understand if companies directly place advertising on disinformation websites or do so automatically through digital advertising allocation tools. To achieve this, the team built a large database combining information from websites that publish hoaxes with the advertising activity of the media over a period of three years. At the same time, they surveyed company executives asking them if they were aware that their organizations were supporting disinformation. They found that, in many cases, they did not know.
The next thing was to check if, indeed, consumers care that the brands they buy support problematic content. To measure that level of discontent, the authors conducted a survey with a random sample of the American population. The objective was to see how consumption varies when they know that certain companies support disinformation websites. They also measured the response based on the intensity with which the companies in question spend money to finance disinformation.
According to the authors, consumers tend to stop betting on products from companies that support misinformation. This behavior persists, furthermore, despite the fact that the consumer is warned that investment in these sites often occurs without the knowledge of the managers. “The data show that this reaction is especially strong among women and left-wing voters,” the work highlights.
Ahmad and his colleagues believe there is scope to decrease funding for disinformation through two “low-cost, scalable” interventions. First, improving transparency so advertisers know where their ads appear could reduce advertising on misinformation websites, especially among companies that were previously unaware that their ads appeared on these sites. And, second, this process would be faster if there were specific platforms dedicated to it.
The American Check My Ads It is one of those platforms. Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkins are in charge of alerting large companies and ad exchanges, those platforms that organize the auction of advertising spaces, from which websites they spread hoaxes. Check My Ads rests on a first great achievement achieved by Jammi: he managed to dry the far-right website of advertising Breitbart Newsby Steve Bannon, Trump’s star advisor in his presidential race and later chief White House strategist until his fall from grace in 2017. That same year, they managed to reiterate 90% of the income anticipated by Breitbart for that year, eight million dollars. “That was possible because 31 of the 34 ad exchanges They withdrew, and with them 4,000 advertisers. But we believe there is a lot of work left to do,” Atkin told EL PAÍS.
How to combat misinformation?
“Our results suggest that both simple information disclosure and comparative company rankings can reduce consumer demand for companies that advertise on disinformation websites,” the study authors note. “It is very likely that companies want to take into account consumer preferences when placing their advertising,” they maintain, which would imply great caution when automating the purchase of digital advertising space.
“Companies could use lists of misinformation outlets provided by independent organizations such as NewsGuard and the GDI to limit advertising budgets.” This would be especially convenient, they say, for companies whose target audience is women or left-wing citizens, the groups most sensitive to advertising investment in misinformation.
They also recommend that portals where advertising is automatically auctioned specify whether they include disinformation websites among their destinations. Another measure could be to regularly publish rankings of companies that support misinformation in order of intensity, in the same way that Google Flights shows flights in order of carbon emissions at the same price.
The study, however, does not assess how the generation of junk content using generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools will affect this equation, which will presumably facilitate its dissemination and increase its volume.
The real effect of hoaxes and cancellation
Nature today publishes two other scientific articles related to misinformation. In one of themthe authors debunk some myths around this content: that people’s average exposure to hoaxes is high, that algorithms are largely responsible for this exposure, and that social networks are the main cause of polarization.
This research documents rather the opposite. The authors conclude that there is a relatively low exposure to hoaxes and lies, which is also highly concentrated in social groups with a strong motivation to consume this type of content. Consequently, they recommend holding the platforms or websites responsible for the content they disseminate and ask for more transparency about what is published.
Other research It corroborates that removing former US President Donald Trump and 70,000 other toxic accounts from Twitter, today known as X, after the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, significantly reduced the spread of misinformation on the social network.
The researchers analyzed a panel of about 600,000 Twitter accounts that were active during the 2020 US election cycle. They found that 1,361 of them, 0.25%, were canceled between January 8 and 12, and that this subset of users was responsible for 4.35% of 24.13% of all misinformation shared on the panel.
The conclusion is that social networks themselves may have the ability to partially control the spread of hoaxes, although the authors highlight that the data come from a single country during a very specific period.
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