Automated Advertising Dragooning Companies On To Junk News Sites

Fine-tuned placement can get internet ads in front of a small and potentially ripe target audience for a fraction of the cost of a conventional big ad campaign. Called “programmatic advertising,” it’s facilitated by layers of companies in a configuration that’s being compared to a stock exchange but, according to a New York Times article, for some corporate clients it’s creating problems. The algorithms used in the process are able to take porn sites and spam out of the mix, but they are not very good at filtering false-news or blatant disinformation sites. Thus, in one example, a major car company found its ad next to a first person account by Yoko Ono about the affair she had with Hillary Clinton in the 1970s. Nonetheless, in a milieu that is obsessed with clicks and numbers of “impressions,” the advertising-fake news juggernaut continues to roll. Meanwhile, according to another Times article, the waters are being muddied by conservatives who are expanding the notion of fake news to include news that merely counters their agenda. The article quotes David Mikkelson, founder of the website Snopes. The term fake news was “specifically about people who purposely fabricated stories for clicks and revenue.” Now, according to Mikkelson, “it includes bad reporting, slanted journalism and outright propaganda. And I think we’re doing a disservice to lump all those things together.”