Google is funneling profits to some of the web’s most prolific fake news in Europe, Latin America and Africa, ProPublica research has found.
The company has publicly pledged to fight misinformation around the world, but a ProPublica analysis, the first done on this scale, documented how Google’s expanding automated virtual advertising operation placed classified ads from major brands around the world that spread false claims about topics like vaccines. Covid-19, climate replacement and elections.
In one case, Google continued to place classified ads in a post in Bosnia and Herzegovina for months after the U. S. government had placed classified ads in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The U. S. government officially imposed sanctions on the site. Google stopped doing business with the site, which the U. S. Treasury Department has done. The U. S. Department described it as the “personal media station” of a prominent Bosnian Serb separatist politician, only after he was contacted via ProPublica.
Google’s classified ads are a main source of profit for sites that choose incorrect information in Brazil, adding false claims about the integrity of the electoral formula made by current President Jair Bolsonaro.
The investigation also revealed that Google places classified ads on sites that spread lies about covid-19 and climate change in French, German, and Spanish-speaking countries.
The resulting advertising revenue is potentially millions of dollars for Americans and the teams that operate those and other untrustworthy sites, while making money for Google.
Platforms like Facebook have been heavily criticized for failing to crack down on misinformation spreading through other people and governments on their platforms around the world. Ad sales provide a critical investment for non-English Internet sites that misinform and harm the public.
Google’s publicly announced policies prohibit placing classified ads on content that makes untrustworthy or destructive statements about a variety of topics, including health, climate, elections and democracy. Still, the investigation found that Google places classified ads, aggregating those of major brands, into pieces that appear to violate its own policy.
ProPublica’s review showed that Google classified ads are more likely to appear in misleading articles written in languages other than English, and that Google benefits from advertising that appears alongside false stories about topics not explicitly addressed in its politics, adding crime, politics and conspiracy theories like chemtrails.
A former Google executive who has worked on accepting as true and security issues said the company is largely focused on English law enforcement and is weaker in other languages and smaller markets. They told ProPublica that’s because Google is investing in surveillance on 3 key concerns.
“Number one is bad PR, they’re very susceptible to that. The moment tries to avoid regulatory scrutiny or possible regulatory action that could have an effect on your business. And No. 3 is turnover,” said the former executive, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity so as not to harm business and career prospects. For those three markets, English-speaking markets basically have the biggest impact. And that’s why most of the effort is directed at them.
ProPublica used the knowledge provided through fact-checking newsrooms, researchers, and online page-tracking organizations to analyze more than 13,000 pages of active articles from thousands of Internet sites in more than a dozen languages to determine whether they were making advertising revenue from Google lately. (For a detailed breakdown of how ProPublica received and analyzed knowledge, see this other important article. )
The investigation found that Google placed classified ads on 41% of the approximately 800 active online articles rated through members of the Poynter Institute’s foreign fact-checking network as fake posts about covid-19. The company also ran classified ads in 20%. climate replaces stories that Science Feedback, a fact-checking organization accredited through the International Fact-Checking Network, found to be false.
Several Google classified classified ads seen through ProPublica gave the impression on articles published months or years ago, suggesting that the company’s inability to block classified ads on content that appears to violate its policies is an ongoing and long-standing problem.
In one example, Google recently placed classified ads for the St John clothing logo on a two-year-old Serbian article that falsely claimed that cat owners don’t catch Covid-19. Google placed an ad for the American Red Cross in a May 2021 article from a far-right German online page claiming that covid-19 is comparable to the flu. An ad for luxury store Coach was recently attached to an April article in Serbian that repeated the false claim that covid-19 vaccines fit people’s DNA.
Last August, the Greek edition of The Epoch Times, a far-right American publication connected to the non-secular Falun Gong movement, published an article falsely claiming that the sun, and not emerging levels of carbon dioxide, could be to blame for global warming. tale featured several Google classified ads when ProPublica saw it, though it obviously appears to violate Google’s policy against weather misinformation.
A Red Cross spokesman said his announcement gave the impression of being on Germany’s far-right online page because of an automated location that he did not directly control.
“Please note that, based on our basic principles of impartiality and neutrality, the Red Cross does not take sides on issues of a political, racial, devout or ideological nature, so we would not intentionally promote any narrative or site like the one you have. shared with us,” the organization said in a statement.
The coach and St John responded to requests for comment.
Google’s policy is to remove classified ads from individual articles that violate its policies and take action throughout the site if the violations are successful at a specific undisclosed threshold. Google removed classified ads from at least 14 Internet sites known in the investigation. after being contacted through ProPublica.
Google spokesman Michael Aciman said the company has invested more money in enforcing and tracking language other than English, which has led to an increase in the number of classified ads blocked on pages that violate its policies. He declined to provide numbers or say how. many other people Google has worked on content in languages other than English and in ad review.
“We have developed extensive measures to combat misinformation on our platform, adding policies covering elections, covid-19 and climate change, and we try to enforce our policies in more than 50 languages,” Aciman said. “In 2021, we got rid of classified ads from over 1700 million publisher pages and 63,000 sites worldwide. We know our work is not done and we will continue to invest in our compliance systems to further stumble upon claims and untrusted users around the world.
Google continues to review the sites and pages ProPublica stores with it and “takes appropriate action on any content that violates our policies,” Aciman said.
The knowledge of ad removal comes from Google’s most recent ad protection report, which focused on classified ads with more than half a million pages that violated policies opposed to destructive claims about Covid-19 and false claims that can undermine elections. But Google doesn’t publish a list of the pages or publishers it’s opposed, the countries and languages in which they operate, or other similar knowledge to its ad protection report.
Google announced its $300 million commitment, announced in 2018, to fight misinformation, fact-checkers and “help journalism thrive in the virtual age. “It provides a must-have benefit that ensures that publishing lies remains profitable.
Laura Zommer, lead executive at Argentina-based Chequeado, founded in 2010 as Latin America’s first fact-checking organization, said Google’s failure to invest in crawling sites in languages other than English is causing serious damage to emerging democracies.
“Disinformation that settles in less evolved democracies can cause even more damage than disinformation circulating in countries with more evolved democracies,” said Zommer, who is also a co-founder of Factchequeado, an initiative to counter the Spanish crisis. language. misinformation in the United States.
In Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, three Balkan countries with fragile democracy, 26 of the region’s 30 most prolific publishers of false and misleading accusations make Google, according to data from local auditors.
“If the world’s largest online advertising platform doesn’t mind making fake news, hate speech and poisonous propaganda successful in societies like ours, and doesn’t aim to do anything to replace it because it wouldn’t be worth it financially, that’s devastating,” he said. Tijana Cvjetićanin, member of the editorial board of the Bosnian fact-checking Raskrinkavanje, who shared knowledge with ProPublica.
A comparison with English-speaking media suggests that Google is more rigorous in opting for its publisher partners in this language. ProPublica found that Google placed classified ads on thirteen percent of English-language Internet sites that NewsGuard deemed untrustworthy for continually posting false or misleading content. headlines that did not meet transparency standards. By contrast, ProPublica’s research found that a maximum of 30% to 90% of sites flagged for false claims through non-English language fact-checkers were monetized with Google.
Along with asymmetric application across languages, ProPublica discovered disparities between and within regions.
Africa Check shared a list of 68 active URLs in English that had been verified as fake through groups in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya since 2019, as well as forty-five French-language articles that had been debunked through their French fact-checkers. ProPublica’s research found that 57% of debunked English-language articles in Africa had Google ads, while the percentage was higher, 66%, for French articles.
Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of the EU Disinfo Lab, a nonprofit that studies disinformation, said Google must apply its policies similarly across languages and regions and be transparent about its surveillance decisions.
“These corporations made the resolution to go global in their services, and it was their own resolve to expand and generate revenue,” he said. “It’s not imaginable to make this selection and not face the obligatory duty of being in all those countries at the same time. “
Google is the world’s largest virtual advertising company. Last year, it generated a record $257 billion in revenue. Most of that cash comes from corporations that pay to place classified ads on Google products, such as search and YouTube. But in 2021, Google made $31 billion by running classified ads from its customers by more than two million worldwide. They’re part of what the company calls the Google Display Network.
These publishing partners range from giant media outlets like the New York Times to small sites run by individuals. To sign up for the Google Display Network, a publisher must meet needs such as publishing original content and complying with policies against untrustworthy content and destructive claims and sexually particular content, among others. Once accepted, Google says, network publishers get 68 percent of the money spent on each ad placed on their site.
Google’s advertising systems are also used to place classified ads on sites that are not necessarily members of your Display Netpaintings. These publishers work with ad tech corporations that have partnered with Google and use their generation to buy and sell classified ads. ads placed on Display Netpaintings sites, Google and the publisher earn money.
Google places classified ads on publishers’ sites using an automatic bidding formula called programmatic advertising. The procedure begins when a user visits an Internet page or opens an application. As the page ranks ads, the site or app owner collects data about the available ad area. as well as user data, which would possibly include location, age range, browsing history and interests.
The knowledge is sent to an ad exchange like the one operated through Google, where ad buyers, ranging from big brands like Spotify to small local businesses, can position an offer to show an ad to the express user visiting the app or. Offers are positioned or not based on user and publisher knowledge shared with potential advertisers and the value an advertiser is willing to pay to succeed in that person.
In the blink of an eye, the highest bidder wins the auction and the ad reaches the page a lot. Money flows from the ad customer to the ad exchange (and any other intermediaries involved in the transaction), reaching the online app. Page or editorial.
In 2019, the Global Misinformation Index, a nonprofit that scans websites for false and misleading content, estimated that disinformation websites generate $250 million in revenue annually, of which Google is guilty of 40% and the rest comes from other ad tech companies. NewsGuard, which employs human reviewers to compare and rate internet sites based on a set of criteria, adding accuracy, estimated in 2021 that annual ad earnings from sites with false or misleading claims were $2. 6 billion. The report did not specify the extent to which Google might be responsible.
The percentage of Google’s profits from monetizing false and misleading content is difficult to estimate. Each of the billions of virtual demo classified ads placed every day through Google has additional value that fluctuates depending on the combination of the advertiser, the target website, and the users to whom the ad will be shown. It’s all part of a complex, opaque and largely Google-governed automated automated procedure for buying and promoting virtual classified ads. That means advertisers want to rely in part on the combination of automation and human review that Google uses to make sure its publisher components violate its policies.
Fact-checkers’ findings can be used through Google to enforce its policy against running classified classified ads alongside content that makes destructive and unreliable claims. There are more than 350 fact-checking projects around the world that employ journalists, and in some cases, scientists, to identify and investigate allegations spread on the web, social media and mainstream media. Your articles and related ratings are used across platforms, adding Meta, to enforce policies related to false and destructive content. Google already highlights facts – checking search effects and Google News to direct other people to reliable information. But the company doesn’t use fact-checks to save classified ads from pages with unreliable or destructive claims. And unlike Meta and TikTok, it doesn’t pay facts. ladies for the purposes of their studies.
“As classified ads advance, they flagrantly monetize misinformation. Whether it’s unknowingly or unknowingly, it doesn’t matter,” said Baybars Örsek, director of the International Fact-Checking Network. “There has never been an ad público. de Google that recognizes fact-checking as a sign of its ad monetization business. “
Google’s Aciman declined to comment on Google’s appointments with fact-checkers.
Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia
On September 20, when he was ready to mobilize part of the country’s population to fight in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Milorad Dodik, a member of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency and Bosnian Serb separatist leader, who expressed strong support for the invasion.
Putin’s meeting was a propaganda stunt for Dodik. Even bigger for him, Google helped make it lucrative.
After the assembly, the homepage of the Serbian media site ATV featured articles praising the assembly and quoting Dodik on plans for greater economic cooperation with Russia, while casting doubt on the genocide committed in the Bosnian war, a common topic of discussion for Dodik. A ProPublica reporter watching those stories earned classified ads for the Saks Fifth Avenue branch, New Balance shoes and eBay that were placed through Google’s advertising systems. cure for Covid-19 and that NATO was making plans to deploy troops in Ukraine.
A spokesperson for Saks said its classified ads were not intended to give the impression on ATV and that the company would block the site from long-term campaigns.
“It was not our goal to promote it on this site, as it violates the logo protection standards we have with our advertising partner,” the company said in a statement.
An eBay spokesperson also said its directory was not “intentionally” placed on ATV. Guess and New Balance did not respond to requests for comment.
Google is helping the site make money through flashy classified ads about false and divisive content, even though ATV’s online page and its related TV station were sanctioned in January by the U. S. Treasury Department. and territorial integrity”. Dodik “exercises non-public over ATVs,” approves content and corruptly routes government contracts to the point of sale, according to the Treasury Department’s sanctions announcement.
Google got rid of classified ads from ATV’s online page after being contacted through ProPublica, but declined to comment on its relationship with the site. “Google is committed to complying with all applicable sanctions,” Aciman said. Respond to requests for comment.
ATV is one of the top 30 common resources of false and misleading content posted in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, according to information provided to ProPublica via Raskrinkavanje. Of the top 30 sites reported through Raskrinkavanje for misrepresentation, 26 made money from Google. The list included popular sites in the area, such as tabloid websites, as well as smaller operations that, in some cases, do not disclose their owners or run through marginal figures.
ProPublica has also scanned nearly 10,000 active articles that fact-checkers in the 3 Balkan countries have flagged for false statements since 2019. Just over 60% got cash from Google. The articles included a series of lies about national politics, the pandemic and vaccines. , the war in Ukraine and other issues.
“Possibly it would only be a monetary factor for Google, but for us it is a corrosive influence in our already very fragile democracies,” Cvjetićanin said.
Dejan Petar Zlatanovic operates Srbin. info, a Serbian who publishes pro-Kremlin propaganda copied from Russian state media, election plots about the United States, and anti-LGBTQ content. Their homepage features a prominent link directly to the Kremlin’s official ArrayGoogle classified ads. as well as on the pages of the article.
Zlatanovic said in an email that Srbin. info earns between $5,000 and $7,000 a month, with Google classified ads offering a significant portion of the revenue.
“The editorial policy of Srbin. info from the beginning was to offer applicable choice information, not brainwash other people or how they deserve to live,” Zlatanovic wrote in Serbian. “All our lives we have lived in a communist and post-communist world founded on determination and we have had enough. “
In April, Srbin. info published a paper claiming that covid-19 mRNA vaccines could simply adjust people’s genetic structure and adjust “human genetics forever. “Vaccines.
Ads from Amazon Prime, BetMGM, Spotify and StyleWe were shown to a ProPublica reporter who saw the story. The companies responded to requests for comment. Google declined to comment on Balkan sites and articles known through ProPublica in the analysis.
Zlatanovic told ProPublica in an email that the article about the vaccine contained what he considered “relevant to the public” because it was sent by a doctor.
Google also placed classified ads on an article that featured a similar misrepresentation when it spread on a set of sites in the region in late 2020, according to local fact-checkers. The false claim that mRNA vaccines can adjust “a person’s genetic structure” was reported via B92, which is among 30 sites in the region with the most reported reporting through fact-checkers. He eventually corrected his story, but he has a history of publishing false claims and potentially destructive content.
B92 has published articles claiming that baking soda can save your life; that watermelon can cure cancer but that it can be poisonous if the fruit is broken (he later corrected this story); And that there is a juice that can kill cancer cells in 42 days, to name just a few of the stories that local fact-checkers have had to debunk. All had Google classified ads when viewed through ProPublica, for the cancer cure story. , which was removed through the site sometime after its publication.
B92 responded to a request for comment.
Rampant misinformation against vaccines and covid-19 appears to have contributed to low vaccination rates in the region. Only 25% of other people are fully vaccinated in Bosnia, while 47% are vaccinated in Serbia and 55% in Croatia, among the lowest. A survey of unvaccinated Bosnians published in April through Raskrinkavanje’s parent company suggests that conspiracy theories have taken root among the population. Nearly a portion of respondents agreed with the false claim that vaccines involve “dangerous nanoparticles” and 38% that mRNA vaccines “alter DNA. “
For at least 4 years, Brazilian President Bolsonaro sowed doubts and incorrect information about the country’s electoral procedure and the reliability of the country’s electronic voting system, leading to a Supreme Court investigation in 2021 that documented his false claims.
To their efforts, pro-Bolsonaro websites with a large audience and a multitude of classified ads courtesy of Google.
One of the largest is Terra Brasil Notícias, a two-year-old site run by a couple founded in one of Brazil’s northeastern provinces. This summer, he posted a story containing an excerpt from “Last Week Tonight” where host John Oliver explained the dangers of electronic voting machines. The site used it to undermine acceptance as true in Brazil’s electronic voting system. Brazil’s electronic voting machines do not use paper audits, but their protection has been continuously tested and there is no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud. in the country.
On October 2, the day Brazilians voted on the first circular of the presidential election, Terra Brasil Notícias, one of several pro-Bolsonaro websites, threatened to fine the president of the country’s Superior Electoral Tribunal for publishing a lie about Bolsonaro’s opponent, Luiz Inácio. Lula da Silva. Terra Brasil Notícias and other sites spread the false claim that the leader of a criminal organization had said he would vote for Lula.
Marie Santini, director of Netlab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said the amount of unwanted news and misinformation sites like Terra Brasil Notícias, as well as its audience, have skyrocketed in Brazil in part because Google’s classified ads allow other people to make money from this type of content. She compared him to other people who drive for Uber to earn extra money.
“You don’t want to make quality content or pictures with journalists. You can copy things, you can use bots, you can recycle news, and you do it from home and you get cash,” he said. “It’s a way to make cash for other people who don’t have opportunities. But who makes money on a large scale? Of course, that’s the platform, Google.
In reaction to the court’s decision, Terra Brasil Notícias withdrew the article repeating the false claim about Lula. He also deleted his article on U. S. voting machines. He was contacted by Brazilian fact-checking organization Aos Fatos last month. 8 recent posts that he called false and asked Terra Brasil Notícias to comment on his appointments with Google. In reaction, he published Aos Fatos’ email and defended the articles. Then he deleted them all. At the time of writing, he is still making money with Google.
Terra Brasil Notícias responded to requests for comment. Google declined to comment.
Santini’s Netlab team monitors thousands of email computers and Internet sites from right to left. They shared a list of 262 active websites in Portuguese in Brazil that circulated on messaging equipment and were classified by investigators as false or misleading information. ProPublica found that 46% of the more than 250 sites reported for incorrect information make money from Google. When this list was compressed to the 30 most sensitive sites shared on WhatsApp and Telegram devices, ProPublica found that 80% of them made money from classified ads placed through Google.
“This ecosystem of sites is very vital for politics in Brazil,” Santini said. “It’s very difficult because other people consume this thinking it’s journalism, but it’s just propaganda. And that is paid for through Google ads.
Classified ads also fund incorrect information about Covid-19 in Brazil. Google placed classified ads on a fake October 2021 story through Stylo Urbano claiming that other people could spread AIDS due to Covid-19 vaccines; a December 2020 false tale about it claiming that COVID-19 PCR tests have a 97% false positive rate; and a fake February 2021 article that said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “deliberately violated several federal laws” by inflating the number of COVID-19 deaths.
After being contacted through ProPublica, Google removed classified ads from the site. Stylo Urbano did not respond to a request for comment.
Brazil is one of many Latin American countries where false claims are funded through Google ads. A coalition of fact-checking organizations in Latin America provided ProPublica with a list of Internet sites that are common resources of false and misleading claims. Of the 49 active sites on the list, 19 (or 39%) are making money lately with Google.
The coalition was led through Chequeado, Argentina’s nonprofit fact-checking organization. Zommer, its founder, said Chequeado beat Google over the years in the form of grants and training. But she and the continued inability of other platforms to enforce their policies in Spanish and other languages outside of English make her job difficult, she said.
“Combat misinformation is uneven, as is the world,” Zommer said.
Google’s mistakes with the law in Spanish, a language spoken by an estimated 550 million people, are getting bigger beyond Latin America.
On September 22, the online page Euskal News, founded in the Basque autonomous region of Spain, published an article suggesting that deaths in the Netherlands and other countries were the result of covid-19 vaccines. The article, which was reprinted elsewhere, said vaccines “may be causing deaths in a much higher than average number. The failure may simply not be more resounding. “
There is no evidence to support claims that COVID-19 vaccines cause excess mortality. But the story is a popular rate for Euskal News, a Google partner publisher that mixes anti-immigrant content and incorrect information about vaccines with warnings of a close takeover by globalists and the European Union.
Google placed classified ads on a May 6 article that erroneously linked the presence of microplastic fibers in the lungs of people wearing masks, even though the study in question was conducted before the pandemic. Google also placed classified classified ads on a page on the site that falsely claims the Pfizer vaccine has resulted in thousands of adverse effects. This claim, and the internal Pfizer documents on which it is based, have been continuously debunked through fact-checkers. Even though it placed classified ads in this article, Google blocked them from someone else on the same site that falsely claims that the Pfizer vaccine had 160,000 adverse effects.
ProPublica has documented more pages in Euskal News with incorrect information about vaccines where Google appears to have blocked classified ads. Google declined to say how many pages it blocks before reviewing its general dating with a site, but removed classified ads from the site. after being contacted through ProPublica.
Euskal News, launched in the spring of 2019, does not mention an owner and its articles have no signature. However, studies through a Spanish virtual security and research company know links between the site and a far-right Basque politician named David Pasarin-Gegunde. In a 2020 interview, he declined to say who runs Euskal News, but said it was a user of its “ideological environment. “The site lists its webmaster as Eneko Eastresana, but he and Pasarin-Gegunde did not respond to requests for comment.
Euskal News is one of 32 active Spanish sites singled out through Brussels-based DisinfoLab as common resources of false and misleading accusations. ProPublica found that 14 of the sites, or 44 percent, make money from Google.
Alaphilippe, who runs DisinfoLab, said the sites on the list “regularly publish misleading, misleading or incorrect data and lack credible or transparent sources. “
Google declined to comment on the Spanish-language sites and articles known in ProPublica’s analysis.
Over the past two decades, Turkey’s media has been drastically replaced.
National newspapers and TV channels have been taken over by others aligned with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, prompting Reporters Without Borders to estimate that 90% of Turkey’s national media are under government control. According to a recent Reuters investigation, the media adheres to “a tight chain of government-approved headlines, front pages and televised debate topics. “
One of the byproducts of Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian data environment (Reporters Without Borders reports that there are nine criminal news hounds in the country lately) is that previously trusted publications publish fake articles about politics, the pandemic and a variety of clickbait aimed at attracting and earning cash traffic from Google search. according to Emre Kızılkaya, chairman of the National Committee of the International Press Institute in Turkey. He cited a study he produced for the International Press Institute that reveals how Google Search rewards pro-government media and the false data they publish.
“President Tayyip Erdoğan and his cronies have used multiple tactics to capture the media over the past two decades, allowing them maximum access to today’s biggest media outlets. These outlets owe most of their virtual traffic, and profits, to Google search,” Kızılkaya, who also publishes a nonprofit news site that reports on Turkish media, told ProPublica.
ProPublica has analyzed more than 1,000 articles deemed fake through Turkey’s fact-checking operation Teyit since 2019, and found that 73% make money from Google ads. This is the highest of all the countries analyzed in the survey.
“In Turkey, disinformation will pay off and propaganda works. Google remains part of this problem, despite its promises to help solve it,” Kızılkaya said. Turkish pro-government media at the expense of endangering fragile communities here. “
Google declined to comment on its search and efforts in Turkey.
In Germany, the right-wing, anti-immigration Freie Welt is led by the husband of Beatrix von Storch, a former vice president of Germany’s main far-right party, Alternative for Germany.
One of the articles on the website, which contained Google classified ads, falsely claims that Ukraine’s wheat shortage is the result of U. S. corporations buying a third of Ukrainian land suitable for cultivation. Another article with classified ads claimed that 44% of pregnant women participating in the Pfizer vaccine trial had had abortions, a lie that fact-checkers denied.
Freie Welt is one of 30 German-language sites that DisinfoLab has identified as consistent resources of false and misleading content. A third of them is created with Google.
The list includes Journalistenwatch, a leading platform of “Neue Rechte,” a far-right political movement in Germany. Google placed an American Red Cross ad on an article falsely claiming that Covid-19 is like the flu. Another article mistakenly linking Germany’s declining birth rate to Covid-19 vaccines was also made for Google.
Journalistenwatch and Freie Welt responded to requests for comment.
Some of the German-language sites known through DisinfoLab are founded in the neighboring countries of Austria and Switzerland. One is Report24, an Austrian online page that spreads false data about COVID-19 measures and vaccination, according to fact-checkers. A ProPublica reporter saw an ad for Hydeline, an American furniture retailer, in a June 2021 article falsely claiming that the World Health Organization advises children and teens to oppose getting vaccinated against covid-19.
Hydeline responded to a request for comment.
In response to ProPublica’s questions, an anonymous spokesperson for Report24 said the above articles have been “carefully researched and involve all mandatory resources, as do each and every article on our online page. “, fake news and fact-checkers funded by the pharmaceutical industry. “
The site claimed that no Google classified ads gave the impression on the articles in question, and that there wasn’t one “for a long time. “The site did not respond after receiving screenshots showing Google classified ads on the article pages.
After being contacted through ProPublica, Google removed the ads from Report24. The company declined to comment on German sites and articles included in the investigation.
Last October, ahead of the United Nations climate summit, Google announced that it would no longer place classified ads on content that “contradicts the authoritative clinical consensus” on climate change.
“Advertisers simply don’t need their classified ads to appear alongside this content,” he reclassified the ads in a review attributed to the Google Ads team.
But as with its Covid-19 policy and vaccine misinformation, Google doesn’t enforce its climate policy in all languages. Science Feedback, a French fact-checking nonprofit that employs journalists and scientists, has provided ProPublica with 427 active URLs of weather-replacement articles. in French and other languages deemed fake since 2021. A fifth of them made money from Google, according to the analysis.
In just one example, the French 1 Scandal published an article in January falsely claiming that global warming is “statistically insignificant” and that “the climate emergency is imaginary. “Google had placed several classified ads on the page when ProPublica reporters visited, adding for Caddis glasses and Rove furniture, as well as a public service announcement about diabetes supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Medical Association and the Ad Council, an advertising industry body.
Kathy Kayse, head of media strategy and partnerships at the Ad Council, said in a statement that the organization relies on the media area given to place classified ads for its public service campaigns. This means that the organization did not pay to place its ad in 1 scandal.
“Because of this model, we cannot expect or control where our content will be placed,” Kayse said, noting that they were responding on behalf of the Ad Council and the American Media Association.
Caddis, Rove, CDC and 1 Scandal did not respond to requests for comment. Google appears to have gotten rid of the site’s classified ads in reaction to ProPublica’s questions.
ProPublica analyzed two rounds of French-language articles deemed false through fact-checkers accredited through the International Fact-Checking Network in France and Senegal.
Among the recent verified French links that make money with Google is a May InfoDuJour article that falsely claimed that other people vaccinated against covid-19 were experiencing an “increase in adverse effects. “The story cited other false claims, which have been the subject of fact-checks, that warned others who opposed receiving doses of “harmful” vaccines.
The same site also recently published an article claiming that athletes are dying in greater numbers and that the cause “probably lies in the advent of an experimental injection that purported to protect against Covid-19 disease, but which, on the contrary, caused incalculable damage to the immune formula and cardiovascular problems.
On August 1, InfoDuJour published an article titled “Anti-Covid vaccines despite everything identified as dangerous!”The page recently features a site report stating that Google found the article violated its policy on destructive Covid-19 disinformation. To comply with the virtual giant’s situations and avoid sanctions, we have made the decision to remove the article,” the page said.
Marcel Gay runs InfoDuJour from Nancy, a city in northeastern France. He told ProPublica that his site’s policy on the pandemic and vaccines has provided him with unprecedented traffic.
“Our media has gained visibility,” he said in an online message sent through the site’s visitor tool.
Gay defended the pandemic content on his site, saying he is “careful to balance the data and give divergent opinions. “and Google Discover, the latter highlighting news in the Google app. He said he got rid of some anti-vaccine articles to keep making money from Google.
“This planetary censorship is in human history,” Gay said. “It is reminiscent of the Inquisition that prevailed in the Middle Ages. “
Google declined to comment on InfoDuJour and 1 Scandal.
Another French-speaking site making money from Google, this time in Africa, is 24Jours. com. Two years ago, it was the subject of separate investigations through fact-checkers DisinfoLab and Observers, who revealed that it was part of a network of more than 10 sites that publish false information, reprint Russian propaganda and steal content from other media outlets.
In the years since, the site has continued to make money from Google with articles with false claims that cunnilingus can save you from cancer, a man has killed more than 20 pizza delivery people, and a woguy has named his children Corona and Virus. Google Classifieds ads also appear in content that 24Jours. com copied verbatim from other sites, including articles stolen from fact-checkers like The Observers.
The 24Jours. com operator, who on WhatsApp was known as Kennedy and claimed to be in Cameroon, told ProPublica that it stopped publishing “fake news” in 2019 and that many sites copy content from resources such as Reuters. After being told that sites pay to allow Reuters content and other resources, Kennedy said he would remove infringing content.
“Less than 10 of my website’s content is copied from other websites,” he said.
Kennedy estimated that Google is lately blocking classified ads for 26 articles on its site. When ProPublica was told to contact Google with questions about its site, it said it would disable Google’s classified ads.
This article was first published on ProPublica.