#EUDisinfo2024: Can advertising cash stop funding misinformation trash?

Is the online ad tech industry inherently fraudulent? This question arises because the ad tech industry appears to have failed to act on rampant fraud and reputational damage to brands for years and publishers’ efforts to clean up the sector have fallen flat. In this session, we’ll examine why the money spent on advertising is ending up in disinformers pockets, making ad tech cash a driver of online disinformation.

Our Executive Director, Victoire Rio, joined Claire Atkin, Domen Savič and Claire Pershan to discuss how and why digital advertising is contributing to the funding of disinformation.

Victoire focused her presentation on the application of the problem to social media gated gardens. She introduced our Content to Payment report and discussed how social media companies are not only profiting off hate and disinformation but increasingly subsidizing it - by providing both the incentive and substantial revenues to actors involved with (re)distributing mis/disinformation content.

Victoire stressed the need for greater transparency and oversight into social media ad revenue sharing programs, their policies and enforcement. She highlighted how existing policies (and existing laws) are not adequately being enforced - and raised some important questions over whether political and government entities as well as state-backed media should be allowed to generate revenue from their social media activity through advertising.

Want to learn more about social media ad revenue sharing?
Read our primer on the issue.