How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

#1

Post by RageoftheRobots » Sat, Nov 20, 2021, 6:13 PM UTC

How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation
technologyreview.com

Re: How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

#2

Post by 1cvmask » Sat, Nov 20, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

Seems like another subtle call for censorship of non-approved misinformation and disinformation news sites. But no mention of all the misinformation and disinformation of corporate media. Some like Washington Post have corrected their coverage of Russiagate and the Steel Dossier. Most of the other content/news outlets have yet to. Some have resorted to equivocation and contrived workarounds. They have failed the test again on the recent Kyle Rittenhouse where all they had to was to the whole video and court trial.

Re: How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

#3

Post by WalterGR » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 4:40 AM UTC

Does anyone else think the subtitle is somewhat misleading?

"The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world."

Yes, technically they are paying them, but they're paying out ad revenue.

I don't dispute the findings in the article, but between that and the use of "tech giants", I had to double-check the source.

Re: How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

#4

Post by nobody9999 » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 8:05 AM UTC

I think my confusion over this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28769144

May well be related to the issues presented in the article.

Re: How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

#5

Post by nobody9999 » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 8:19 AM UTC

WalterGR wrote: post #3

Does anyone else think the subtitle is somewhat misleading? "The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world." Yes, technically they are paying them, but they're paying out ad revenue. I don't dispute the findings in the article, but between that and the use of "tech giants", I had to double-check the source.

>Does anyone else think the subtitle is somewhat misleading?

>"The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world."

I'm not sure if "misleading" is the term I'd use.

The article goes into quite a bit of detail about how Facebook and Google profit a great deal from the clickbait farms that seem to predominate in the global south, where neither company does much in the way of vetting the content that the ads are displayed with aren't plagiarized or extremely low quality (see my other post here, which may well be an example of such a clickbait farm).

So no, FB and Google don't directly pay for the clickbait content, but they do give these folks a cut of the ad revenue. And without that ad revenue, it's unlikely that these "publishers" would even bother at all.

The snippet you quoted is accurate in that sense, IMHO.

But as always, folks need to draw their own conclusions.