Last October, some of the largest tech entities and their ad services announced they would be banning the monetization of climate denial and disinformation content, including through ads. The news was a long time coming for companies like Google, though it took until this year for Twitter to roll out a similar policy. According to a new study from Dewey Digital, little has changed for major ad companies, however.
Criteo, Google, Outbrain, and Taboola follow similar rules on disinformation, yet Dewey Digital found that “across the top 113 websites that publish climate disinformation… nearly 80% of these sites displayed advertising from one or more major ad networks.” That includes Google, Amazon, and Yahoo. Amazon has a policy barring “deceptive, false, or misleading content” through its ad services, as does Yahoo. Those rules mean nothing if they’re rarely, if ever, enforced.
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Dewey Digital’s research comes in partnership with Friends of the Earth and the Climate Action Against Disinformation and reveals that a lot of the major sites pushing what’s described as denialism, conspiracy, and “doomerism”—the belief that there is nothing that can be done to combat climate change from an individual or corporate level—happen to be right-wing or even far-right. The study’s list of the top 10 climate disinformation sites includes Fox News, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, and the Daily Caller.
Hosting ads on sites like these comes at an incredible benefit for companies like Google. Were the tech giant to sell its display ads at an industry rate of about 63 cents per click, the more than 12 million clicks generated on sites pushing downright dangerous rhetoric on the climate crisis would net Google around $7.6 million. Suddenly Google’s removal of its “don’t be evil” mantra in 2018 starts to make more sense when greed is taken into account. But big tech should enforce its policies and, at the least, be held accountable, right?
Google and Amazon are especially notorious for benefitting from content they’ve allegedly banned or restricted. A report in 2020 found that both companies profited off of pandemic misinformation, allowing ads to be shown on sites with outright conspiracy theories. Major brands also benefitted from wantonly advertising on untrustworthy sites, including L’Oreal and Nike.
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