Technology Amplified Disinformation, Now It Must Demonetize It

Cameron Harris took a $5 investment and made it $22,000 in less than 3 months.  No, he’s not the most impressive investor of his generation, he’s the founder of the fake news site  ChristianTimesNewspaper.com. Despite voting for Trump, Cameron claims in a New York Times interview that his motivations were monetary, not partisan: “[I] would have been willing to promote Mrs. Clinton and smear Mr. Trump had those tactics been lucrative.” Leveraging partisanship for money like this is nothing new. In fact, 15 years ago Thomas Frank warned of the dangers of “cultural anger [being] marshaled to achieve economic ends” in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas?. The bad news is that 15 years later the structure of social media and online advertisements has made it easier, faster, and more valuable to fuel partisanship and cultural anger. The good news is these same structures can do the opposite: demonetize disinformation.

The current social media ecosystem encourages the creation of fake news by making it profitable to spread. When Facebook went public in 2012, it had to prove its profitability to investors, a move which forever changed the digital media and ad space. The traditional editorial decision-making that had to balance fact checking and fairness with the need to generate reader interest was boiled down to a narrow focus on attracting readers, no truth required. Studies have shown just how much money can be made trafficking in this type of fact-free media. For example, the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) sampled 20,000 illegitimate websites and tracked their ad revenue to estimate that advertisers spend at least $235 million per year running ads on such websites. Another study by the same group, in collaboration with the Southern Poverty Law Center, found $1.5 million of this spending went to extremists groups in 2020. Some of these groups included the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, who are closely associated with the January 2021 insurrection.

This provides sufficient funding for fake news creators but, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, is a drop in the bucket of the $139.8 billion spent on 2020 digital advertising (this includes ads on search engines like Google, articles, social media, YouTube videos, and more). From a business’s perspective it makes sense to cut the tiny amount of ad revenue that goes to fake news sites or hate groups rather than risk associating their brand with such content. Especially as the scrutiny over the spread of disinformation grows, companies that continue to advertise on such sites risk being framed as key financial supporters of this pernicious ecosystem. For companies with sufficient influence and power, it makes sense to cut ties with disreputable news sources to protect their own reputations.

Even if companies were incentivized to remove ads from disreputable sites, can ad servers — which liaise between retailers looking to place advertisements and websites looking to sell ad space — be incentivized to cut potential ad space? Encouragingly, a study by researchers at the University of Michigan School of Information suggests they can. The study found that ad servers rely on disreputable sites for very little of their revenue while a separate study by the same group found that the majority of ads placed on disreputable sites are only placed on a handful of sites. For example, in the case of Amazon, the vast majority of these poor ad placements (45%) are on just one website. This places ad servers in a strong position to cut ties with disinformation sites without facing significant financial impact or having to cut ties with many advertising spaces all at once.

Even if ad servers decided to tackle the issue of ad spending on fake news, the tools are not yet available to fully automatize the process of tracking ad placement, and even when they are, their use will require close cooperation between technology companies, advertisers, and think tanks or NGOs that dedicate themselves to identifying fake news. The good news is that the companies buying and selling the largest share of this ad space are reputable, influential, and have the funds and talent to take on this challenge. These companies include the likes of Google, Amazon, Office Max and Sprint. Google alone could make a huge impact because they account for 48% of ad traffic on fake news sites and 32% of ads on low quality sites.

Big Tech is known to dedicate inordinate time and resources to fix problems they deem worthy. The problem of the monetization of fake news could certainly be considered one such problem, but only a handful of major companies have taken the initiative to solve it. Those who have taken action include Proctor and Gamble, which decided to partner only with firms that have accreditation from trade groups that ensure best practices for combating fraud, and Unilever, which has partnered with IBM to improve the transparency of its ad placements. These initiatives will have their desired impact, according to a 2018 study that compared Twitter and Facebook shares of fake news articles before and after Facebook banned ads on fake news sites from their advertising networks in November 2016. Twitter made no such change, so it served as a comparison for what would have happened had Facebook not instilled the ban. The result was that the share of fake news articles on Facebook fell by 75%.

Perhaps once consumers become aware that the brands they love are supporting the fake news that has contributed to pernicious lies about the COVID-19 vaccine and pandemic, or the false claims of election fraud, more companies will take the steps Proctor and Gamble and Unilever have taken to secure where their ad dollars end up. Fake news is such a thorny policy issue because it runs into the problem of free speech protection and digital companies’ protections under Section 230. If consumers demand the companies they love break up with fake news advertising, it will sidestep this issue because demonetizing disinformation does not limit free speech, it just limits incentives to create it. Consumers, therefore, hold the power to demand that technology stop amplifying disinformation, and demonetize it instead.