How Misinformation Spreads? It's Funded By 'The Hellhole of Programmatic Advertising' (wired.com) 66
Journalist Steven Brill has written a new book called The Death of Truth. Its subtitle? "How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World-And What We Can Do."
An excerpt published by Wired points out that last year around the world, $300 billion was spent on "programmatic advertising", and $130 billion was spent in the United States alone in 2022. The problem? For over a decade there's been "brand safety" technology, the article points out — but "what artificial intelligence could not do was spot most forms of disinformation and misinformation..."
The end result... In 2019, other than the government of Vladimir Putin, Warren Buffett was the biggest funder of Sputnik News, the Russian disinformation website controlled by the Kremlin... Geico, the giant American insurance company and subsidiary of Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, was the leading advertiser on the American version of Sputnik News' global website network... No one at Geico or its advertising agency had any idea its ads would appear on Sputnik, let alone what anti-American content would be displayed alongside the ads. How could they? Which person or army of people at Geico or its agency could have read 44,000 websites?
Geico's ads had been placed through a programmatic advertising system that was invented in the late 1990s as the internet developed. It exploded beginning in the mid 2000s and is now the overwhelmingly dominant advertising medium. Programmatic algorithms, not people, decide where to place most of the ads we now see on websites, social media platforms, mobile devices, streaming television, and increasingly hear on podcasts... If Geico's advertising campaign were typical of programmatic campaigns for broad-based consumer products and services, each of its ads would have been placed on an average of 44,000 websites, according to a study done for the leading trade association of big-brand advertisers.
Geico is hardly the only rock-solid American brand to be funding the Russians. During the same period that the insurance company's ads appeared on Sputnik News, 196 other programmatic advertisers bought ads on the website, including Best Buy, E-Trade, and Progressive insurance. Sputnik News' sister propaganda outlet, RT.com (it was once called Russia Today until someone in Moscow decided to camouflage its parentage), raked in ad revenue from Walmart, Amazon, PayPal, and Kroger, among others... Almost all advertising online — and even much of it on television (through streaming TV), or on podcasts, radio, mobile devices, and electronic billboards — is now done programmatically, which means the machine, not a planner, makes those placement decisions. Unless the advertiser uses special tools, such as what are called exclusion or inclusion lists, the publishers and content around which the ad appears, and which the ad is financing, are no longer part of the decision.
"What I kept hearing as the professionals explained it to me was that the process is like a stock exchange, except that the buyer doesn't know what stock he is buying... the advertiser and its ad agency have no idea where among thousands of websites its ad will appear."
An excerpt published by Wired points out that last year around the world, $300 billion was spent on "programmatic advertising", and $130 billion was spent in the United States alone in 2022. The problem? For over a decade there's been "brand safety" technology, the article points out — but "what artificial intelligence could not do was spot most forms of disinformation and misinformation..."
The end result... In 2019, other than the government of Vladimir Putin, Warren Buffett was the biggest funder of Sputnik News, the Russian disinformation website controlled by the Kremlin... Geico, the giant American insurance company and subsidiary of Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, was the leading advertiser on the American version of Sputnik News' global website network... No one at Geico or its advertising agency had any idea its ads would appear on Sputnik, let alone what anti-American content would be displayed alongside the ads. How could they? Which person or army of people at Geico or its agency could have read 44,000 websites?
Geico's ads had been placed through a programmatic advertising system that was invented in the late 1990s as the internet developed. It exploded beginning in the mid 2000s and is now the overwhelmingly dominant advertising medium. Programmatic algorithms, not people, decide where to place most of the ads we now see on websites, social media platforms, mobile devices, streaming television, and increasingly hear on podcasts... If Geico's advertising campaign were typical of programmatic campaigns for broad-based consumer products and services, each of its ads would have been placed on an average of 44,000 websites, according to a study done for the leading trade association of big-brand advertisers.
Geico is hardly the only rock-solid American brand to be funding the Russians. During the same period that the insurance company's ads appeared on Sputnik News, 196 other programmatic advertisers bought ads on the website, including Best Buy, E-Trade, and Progressive insurance. Sputnik News' sister propaganda outlet, RT.com (it was once called Russia Today until someone in Moscow decided to camouflage its parentage), raked in ad revenue from Walmart, Amazon, PayPal, and Kroger, among others... Almost all advertising online — and even much of it on television (through streaming TV), or on podcasts, radio, mobile devices, and electronic billboards — is now done programmatically, which means the machine, not a planner, makes those placement decisions. Unless the advertiser uses special tools, such as what are called exclusion or inclusion lists, the publishers and content around which the ad appears, and which the ad is financing, are no longer part of the decision.
"What I kept hearing as the professionals explained it to me was that the process is like a stock exchange, except that the buyer doesn't know what stock he is buying... the advertiser and its ad agency have no idea where among thousands of websites its ad will appear."
Blame Russia (Score:1, Troll)
I always listen to the White House and the billionaire-owned media for unbiased non-misinformation. Yuperee sir!
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Yeah, I'm thinking a con man from New York City, who isn't actually a billionaire judging by the fact that he's always short of cash, may be the way to go this time around.
Re: Blame Russia (Score:2)
Um, who or what are you responding to?
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Well, it doesn't sound like you want anything to do with billionaires, so maybe you should look into this guy, too.
Not "Superspreaders" (mostly older women)? (Score:3)
https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com]
I can attest to one in my life that feels very emotional and judgemental about everybody else, with no chance or expectation to do anything but feel angry and self-riotous.
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[arstechnica.com]
That's histerical. Using Ars Technica, a leading distributor of dogma driven dis-information, as a source for anything.
Advertisers are in business to reach consumers. They pay no attention to the content used to attract eyeballs for their advertising. There is nothing new about that. Nor does it cause "bad" content. What causes "bad" content is that it successfully attracts an audience.
Anyone who buys a product that is advertised pays for the advertising. So it was Gieco customers, not Warrent Buffet, who
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Your posts aren't going to raise /. from a third-rate distributor of dogma driven dis-information, no matter how hard you try.
"If you want to fix the problem, make paid advertising illegal."
LOL
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"If you want to fix the problem, make paid advertising illegal."
LOL
Yes, that idea is quite retarded*.
But the other. Or make the publishers responsible for the products they advertise.
Is what any sensible country would do. Facebook/Twitter/Whatever is pushing scams and defrauding people of billions of dollars. Then make those companies pay up or stop.
Companies pushing these lies aren't going to care unless someone makes them care.
* Although it worked quite well for specific sectors like tobacco etc.
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> Anyone who buys a product that is advertised pays for the advertising.
Define advertising.
The reason I bring this up is because there are many kinds of advertising -- paid and unpaid -- across many different types of mediums. i.e. Word of mouth is a form of advertising that is usually free, "Let's Play Videos" are a form of advertising, etc.
Not ALL ads cost me the consumer to pay for it. Sure it "costs" me time to listen / watch a source but it does not always correlate to who exactly I am "paying".
If
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If I buy an advertised product without seeing the ads am I still paying for the ad? Not directly but indirectly? How do you prove this?
Who do you think is paying for the ad? Do they charge you less for the product because you didn't see the ad on facebook? No.
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Because only paid advertising has disinformation / propaganda, right?
That isn't the point of the article. Its that advertising pays for the further spreading of some disinformation. You can't eliminate disinformation unless you are China and then it obviously depends on your definition of what is disinformation. And even China is 100% successful.
Re: Not "Superspreaders" (mostly older women)? (Score:2)
Of course! that advertiser indifference to content explains why Truth is overloaded with advertiser money right now. /s
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Anyone who buys a product that is advertised pays for the advertising.
No, we all pay.
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I can attest to one in my life that feels very emotional and judgemental about everybody else, with no chance or expectation to do anything but feel angry and self-riotous.
I know her too but I wasn't aware she spread that far.
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Mums for Liberty and Stop Corrupting our Kids are about censorship, nothing else. It's pregnant women and grannies (ie. formerly-pregnant women) deciding that tweens can't know the truth. Many times, the censorship is not limited to sexual activity and same-sex relationships: Any scene involving romance or intimacy between two people must be hidden from the very people who need role models for romance and intimacy.
And none of it works. (Score:5, Insightful)
Internet-users are well-trained to ignore ads. It's almost completely unconscious. Our eyes skip over and filter out the sections of a page that contain ads. When big in-your-face popup ads appear over the content, we instinctively search the corners for a faded "x", not even processing whatever-it-is on the popup.
And the more capable among us use ad-blocking software too.
It's an enormous farce. There were studies posted right here on slashdot demonstrating that these methods are ineffective, and the money spent on them wasted (the exercise of finding those studies is left to the student).
It's still concerning that American-based companies are spending money that ultimately winds up in the hands of a government that is actively trying to undermine our culture. But it is also darkly humorous that all this money shuffling supports an utterly ineffective form of mass social manipulation.
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Yeah, bots feeding bots. The computer programs that generate these ad campaigns are responding to the computer programs that correlate and then sell "targeted ad opportunities."
The question in my mind is "If we can severely curtail the surveillance economy built on extracting and fusing user characteristics from data that the user has not authorized, will this have any real impact on the garbage pit that most websites have become?" I'm particularly bothered by the journalism industry that says they are no
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Yeah, bots feeding bots.
Perhaps a bot centipede?
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Because it fails on most but they're not showing the ad to a thousand people... they're showing it to hundreds of millions and the few and it costs so little that the few who it works on make it profitable.
It'll never happen, but what I'd love is a system that requires advertisers to pay me when their ads pop up on my computer. They're using my computer resources, after all; just because I click on a link to Company X's website doesn't mean I have given permission to Company Y to spam me with ads (especial
Re:And none of it works. (Score:5, Interesting)
Then I had to stop using it when Google pushed(*) Javascript requirements on everyone to support their spying operations and online app alternatives (like Gmail) in their constant fight with MIcrosoft. Pretty soon the whole web was all interactive Javascript UI's and ads bolted on the usual static content, 99% fluff for every 1% text content.
Textise is a step in the right direction, but the root cause is that Google has taken over the HTML standard and turned it into a "living standard" aka "whatever we want when we want". The community can't fight this purely on a technical front because we're always one step behind on the specs. What's really needed at this stage is to break their hold on the engineering standards but I don't know how best to accomplish this.
(*) like a drug pusher
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It sure does work. It moves money from the pockets of the companies buying the ads into Googles pockets.
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Re:And none of it works. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah at least a few companies are measuring the results of their ad. Even before the internet, they'd use a separate phone number for an ad campaign, and now they can measure in absurd detail. I bet these companies really hate to see their ad on websites that convince people to turn their adblockers off.
Muhahaha! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what they want you to think. (Score:2)
Misinformation starts at the source (Score:2, Informative)
There are tens of thousands of advocacy based organizations, researchers, non-profit employees, PR firms, corporate marketing, government marketing employees whose sole job it spread information giving one side of a discussion, slights against the other possible views in the discussion.
For example, the well worn and widely reporting on surveys of financial health where there's one survey covering everybody and then a different distinct survey covering half the population.
That leads to a flood of news articl
Monetize attention... surprised it's (ab)used? (Score:2)
Why do we think people shouldn't be 'slaves', but manipulating those supposedly free minds is fair game.
Drugs are bad because they force people to do things they otherwise wouldn't, but hiding the truth and manipulating data is totally no problem in a 'free market'.
Wonder how society would change if we pointed AI at our hypocrisy? Point out the 'work' that isn't useful, and help us stop it (like all the stupidity that taxes entails, with the tricks only certain people know about or can use). And how our c
Long live ad blockers (Score:2)
YouTube can call me a thief but I am not part of the ones sponsoring or funding the ads companies's incompetence.
This is horrible (Score:2)
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Putting aside the moronic Russia angle, which by itself is enough to dismiss the entire article as either written by an idiot or written as propaganda for idiots...
nail on the head. this isn't about misinformation, but about the status quo losing the monopoly of misinformation. that's the one big thing that internet and social media has changed: now everyone can do it. this idiot's advertising is an apt example.
the other thing that changed is that it allowed a lot of uncomfortable truths to get out too, and that's one extra reason for the loss of confidence in the system and its institutions. sadly, that's not good news at all because there's no real solution: we are
Where do they get these figures for advertising? (Score:2)
Re: Where do they get these figures for advertisi (Score:2)
Why I support adblocking (Score:3)
Besides that the internet with ads is intolerable, ad-supported crap is fundamentally different, and worse, than it otherwise would be. The internet was fine before this cancer took over. For you young ones who don't remember, there are a few offers in real life of "get this free lunch if you listen to our salesman" -- try and guess how the quality and service compares to a real restaurant. And of course, ad-supported "games". Fundamentally, ads are user-hostile and a form of money-up-front request from strangers -- they get money from your click, possibly after scamming you with a clickbait headline or scamming google with SEO.
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The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled ... (Score:1)
... was social bloody media, he said with bloody social media.
We are in the midst of a "Greedback loop", a "Feedback loop" we are yet to adapt to. We're greedy for content and contact. Advertisers are greedy for market. Social Media are greedy for the advertising revenue. Content creators are greedy for fame and a slice of the price. It's a whirlpool shit storm of mutual advantage.
The Arab Spring, Brexit, MAGA, Culture War, Teen Suicide, you can all lay at the door of Social Media. None would have been pos
The culprit behind the ruining of the internet (Score:2)
Also Republicans (Score:4, Informative)
I know it's not popular to point all this out. We're supposed to pretend we're somehow above politics. But who decided that, and why?
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I know it's not popular to point all this out. We're supposed to pretend we're somehow above politics. But who decided that, and why?
Probably the liberal media, which poured much more money and effort into getting Trump elected than the Russians could have hoped to.
They are unable to blame themselves, so they blame tech or foreign nations or all of us mere plebes.
What liberal media? (Score:2, Flamebait)
I get that you're trolling but it's not 1995 anymore and nobody believes the media has a liberal bias except a handful of the deepest of the deep in the Trump cult. You're just making yourself look silly.
On the other hand you probably know this site has a limited amount of mod points so that
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Or you could just be one of those crazy ass Trump cultists. Somebody who thinks that he's the second coming of Christ.
It's you and yours who have the weird, and I mean weird, obsession with Trump.
I've read some of the stuff that you imagine his pragmatic voters are thinking ... that's some weird stuff man. And it came out of your own id, lol, not ours.
Re: What liberal media? (Score:2)
Well, we tried ignoring him at first, and that turned out to be a really bad idea.
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Is there something in the water in Arizona: No sex education, no abortions, 'stolen' election conspiracies and MAGA policies so worthless, even Arizona is voting against it.
I get it; the rich, white, Christian, English-speaking US-ians no longer decide the policies for government. So, a bunch of self-important arseholes are voting for another self-important arsehole, who cares about their lack of importance: Anyone see the mistake in their plan?
Government is meant to be by us and for us. Until we reac
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I know it's not popular to point all this out. We're supposed to pretend we're somehow above politics. But who decided that, and why?
lol, ok. I see plenty of ads showing over at CNN, MSN, CBS, and every other place where they are celebrating the, er, defense of democracy (the success of trumped up BS charges against political opponents).
So is that "funding misinformation"? Or is only The Party [wikipedia.org] allowed to make money by running ads?
The payload (Score:1)
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Use "Check my Ads" (Score:2)
They're a "brand safety" organisation, at https://checkmyads.org/ [checkmyads.org]
They catch organisations like Sputnik News and notify the advertisers, so they can drop the ad exchanges that are placing ads on pages that are on the advertisers' blacklists. I think they're cool...