Two efforts to disrupt the dangerous disinformation economy.
Media Matters & Check My Ads are fighting back against Fox & other bad actors and we can all help out.
Disinformation flows throughout the internet for profit. That’s led people to consider ways to disrupt the disinformation economy as a way to reign in the lies.
This week, for example, Angelo Carusone, President of the media watchdog organization Media Matters for America wrote a lengthy twitter thread explaining the lucrative carriage fees Fox earns from companies like Xfinity (Comcast). Then he explained that Fox is now preparing for upcoming negotiations to renew the multi-year agreement that sets these fees with the cable companies. He urged everyone to join the effort to push companies to resist efforts by FOX to keep these outsized fees. To do that, he is asking everyone to sign up at nofoxfee.com. This is not an appeal for money. It is an effort to build a large community of like-minded folks who think we should not be paying for lies with our cable bill.
Of course carriage fees are not the only way FOX News earns revenue, and FOX is hardly the only source of autocratic disinformation on the internet. Brietbart and dozens of other organizations I won’t name here do not get carriage fees. They thrive on ad revenue.
And here’s the key thing to understand, companies do not place their ads on webpages or social media. That is not how it works. Now a whole new industry, the ad-tech industry, manages the flow of advertising.
Publications seeking ad revenue put “ad units” on their webpages and news feeds then contract with ad exchanges to place the ads in those units. The exchanges use sophisticated data analytics, user surveillance, and, increasingly AI, to gather information on users and serve up ads that will be the most lucrative.
Often the owner of the publication does not know what ad runs on their site until someone sees it. The converse is also true- most of the time advertisers do not know where their ads will be placed. Meanwhile, digital ad revenue is a $700 billion enterprise.
These exchanges have made digital advertising very efficient. But there is a downside. Companies who would never agree to support lies on the internet find their ads showing up on Fox.com, and Breitbart and all the rest of the disinformation sites across the internet.
That got two young marketers thinking. Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin wondered if quality brands really want to be associated with all these lies. They asked whether big brands, if they knew their names were associated with disinformation sites, would take action. Turns out they do care. Nandini and Claire then founded checkmyads.org to reshape the digital ad-tech industry.
They have already had a big impact, depriving sites like Breitbart not only of much needed revenue, but also taking from them the implicit legitimacy that quality advertisers bring.
Claire and I talked on my radio show this past week.. I asked her what worried her most, and her answer will astound you:
The attack on democracy is a global one, and it is supported by unwitting advertisers and consumers through the opaque digital ad-tech industry.
So glad there are folks like Media Matters and CheckMyAds out there to hold the surveillance ad-tech industry accountable, to defend brands who do not want to inadvertently support disinformation, to create ways for all of us to participate in building a more transparent ad-tech industry, and to push back against the disinformation economy.
These newsletters will help you stay up to date on digital disinformation:
Sign up for the weekly Media Matters newsletter here: https://action.mediamatters.org/content/sign-email-updates
Get the Check My Ads updates here: https://checkmyads.org/branded/