Abstract
When we think of Google supporting the fake news industry, the first thing that comes to mind is how, as described in the previous chapter, it serves up an audience with its various search products. However, there is an entirely separate way—less obvious but extremely influential—that Google supports the fake news industry: financially through ad revenue. The first half of this chapter focuses on the mechanics and scale of Google’s algorithmic ad distribution system, the extent to which it funds fake news organizations, and the reluctant steps Google has taken over the years to curtail this dangerous flow of funds.
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Notes
- 1.
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- 2.
Joseph Johnson, “Advertising revenue of Google from 2001 to 2020,” Statista, February 5, 2021: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-revenue-of-google/.
- 3.
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- 4.
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- 5.
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- 6.
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- 7.
- 8.
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- 9.
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- 10.
This forty percent is less than the seventy percent mentioned above because revenue is based on traffic—and while Google served ads on seventy percent of the sites, some of the highly trafficked ones were served ads by other providers.
- 11.
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- 12.
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- 13.
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- 14.
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- 16.
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- 17.
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- 18.
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- 19.
Julia Angwin, Madeleine Varner, and Ariana Tobin, “Facebook Enabled Advertisers to Reach ‘Jew Haters’,” ProPublica, September 14, 2017: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-enabled-advertisers-to-reach-jew-haters.
- 20.
Julia Angwin and Terry Parris Jr., “Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race,” ProPublica, October 28, 2016: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers-exclude-users-by-race.
- 21.
See Footnote 20.
- 22.
“Improving Enforcement and Promoting Diversity: Updates to Ads Policies and Tools,” Facebook newsroom, February 8, 2017: https://about.fb.com/news/2017/02/improving-enforcement-and-promoting-diversity-updates-to-ads-policies-and-tools/.
- 23.
Julia Angwin, Ariana Tobin, and Madeleine Varner, “Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race,” ProPublica, November 21, 2017: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-discrimination-housing-race-sex-national-origin.
- 24.
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- 25.
Tracy Jan and Elizabeth Dwoskin, “HUD is reviewing Twitter’s and Google’s ad practices as part of housing discrimination probe,” Washington Post, March 28, 2019: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/28/hud-charges-facebook-with-housing-discrimination/.
- 26.
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- 27.
Felix Richter, “Amazon Challenges Ad Duopoly,” Statista, February 21, 2019: https://www.statista.com/chart/17109/us-digital-advertising-market-share/.
- 28.
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- 29.
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- 30.
Julia Love and Kristina Cooke, “Google, Facebook move to restrict ads on fake news sites,” Reuters, November 14, 2016: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-advertising/google-facebook-move-to-restrict-ads-on-fake-news-sites-idUSKBN1392MM.
- 31.
Lesley Chiou and Catherine Tucker, “Fake News and Advertising on Social Media: A Study of the Anti-Vaccination Movement,” SSRN, July 6, 2018: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3209929.
- 32.
Satwik Shukla and Tessa Lyons, “Blocking Ads From Pages that Repeatedly Share False News,” Facebook newsroom, August 28, 2017: https://about.fb.com/news/2017/08/blocking-ads-from-pages-that-repeatedly-share-false-news/.
- 33.
Cecilia Kang, “Facebook’s Hands-Off Approach to Political Speech Gets Impeachment Test,” New York Times, October 8, 2019: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/technology/facebook-trump-biden-ad.html.
- 34.
Elizabeth Culliford, “Warren campaign challenges Facebook ad policy with ‘false’ Zuckerberg ad,” Reuters, October 12, 2019: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-facebook/warren-campaign-challenges-facebook-ad-policy-with-false-zuckerberg-ad-idUSKBN1WR0NU.
- 35.
Rob Leathern, “Expanded Transparency and More Controls for Political Ads,” Facebook newsroom, January 9, 2020: https://about.fb.com/news/2020/01/political-ads/.
- 36.
Brian Fung, “Trump campaign runs hundreds of misleading Facebook ads warning of Super Bowl censorship,” CNN, January 24, 2020: https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/24/media/trump-super-bowl-facebook-ad/index.html.
- 37.
Nathaniel Gleicher, “Labeling State-Controlled Media On Facebook,” Facebook newsroom, June 4, 2020: https://about.fb.com/news/2020/06/labeling-state-controlled-media/.
- 38.
Scott Spencer, “An update on our political ads policy,” Google blog, November 20, 2019: https://blog.google/technology/ads/update-our-political-ads-policy/.
- 39.
Zeynep Tufekci, “Beware the Smart Campaign,” New York Times, November 16, 2012: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/opinion/beware-the-big-data-campaign.html.
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Giansiracusa, N. (2021). Avarice of Advertising. In: How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7155-1_7
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