What if your charity’s ad budget was funding division and hate? You hope to reach new supporters, but the advertising you paid for lands on a website potentially inciting riots.
Why? The opaque and profit-driven world of digital ad placement holds the answer – and speaks volumes about the information environment we live in today.
Instead of harnessing technology’s potential to connect people, this $1 trillion AdTech industry incentivises the spread of disinformation, division, and the erosion of society’s shared reality.
A new report from Check My Ads Institute, commissioned by Luminate, attempts to show how.
Tracing the journey of an unnamed UK charity’s ads, it shows how websites made to monetise bursts in traffic by promoting disinformation can wreak havoc with our information space and our societies.
In July 2024, when the UK was reacting with raw anger to the murders of three girls in Southport, a “Made-for-Advertising" website called Channel3Now (taken down since) posted a bogus article about the identity of the killer, falsely saying he was a Muslim who arrived on a boat as an asylum seeker – identities that stoke prejudice.
The article was posted on X (formerly Twitter) and was viewed nearly 2 million times before it was deleted. Over the next week in Britain, many Muslims and migrants feared going out as mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers were vandalised.
According to fraud analytics firm Pixalate, 13% of digital ad spending goes to such “Made-for-Advertising” websites like Channel3Now that ended up causing chaos, for which the British taxpayer had to pay.
But who brought Channel3Now into the advertising supply chain?
A digital model based on profit and secrecy
As the Check My Ads report explains, the answer lies in part with the behemoth that is Google’s advertising business, and a little-known company called Ezoic.
Ezoic acts as an advertising broker, matching available advertising spaces on websites with brands seeking to buy advertising space. In this market, the likes of ‘Channel3Now’ compete for advertising revenue and traffic with genuine media outlets.
When websites like Channel3News suddenly go offline, all the evidence vanishes. It requires some level of expertise to figure out the connections (as shown in the report) in this opaque industry and most of the times, the advertiser behind the digital ads – like this unnamed UK charity whose ads Check My Ads tracked – is totally clueless about where their ads end up being shown.
Check My Ads’ investigation shows that Channel3News claimed to work with major ad distributors like Google and Ezoic, but without a response from those companies it cannot be confirmed with 100% certainty whether and to what extent these companies monetised Channel3Now. These disclosures are voluntary, and – as Check My Ads highlights – Google has one of the worst compliance rates in the industry.
If Google followed its own policies on unreliable and harmful content, the website Channel3Now should not have been monetised, but the company has a documented track record of breaching its own policies.
The digital ad industry fuels platforms power, with too few safeguards
The way the system works creates a tragedy of the commons for all, and profits for a few: companies like Google and Ezoic. It simultaneously impoverishes genuine and robust news media websites by drawing advertising dollars away from nuanced and fact-checked reporting, sending it to websites peddling fear, outrage, and lies.
Online advertising is so opaque it is broken, and its impact on society might be diffuse – but it is profound. As we saw in the UK last summer, it particularly harms some of the most marginalised people the most.
Backed by Check My Ads’ research, the UK Parliament’s inquiry committee on ‘social media, misinformation and the role of algorithms’ questioned Google on its role in the riots (see the exchanges between 10:25:55 – 10:28:33) and are awaiting a response.
This Parliamentary inquiry is exploring how to balance tackling misinformation and protecting free speech, the effectiveness of the Online Safety Act in this regard, and other policy measures that might be needed.
So what can we do? We can push for the enforcement of existing regulation as well as new rules mandating transparency by adtech companies.
This could require these companies to disclose publicly the lists of websites that they monetise and show advertisers where their ads have appeared. This would allow for everyone to understand which sites are making money from ads, through which AdTech companies, and how long these business relationships persist. This type of transparency would serve as the foundation for accountability.
At Luminate, we support people, organisations, and movements working at this intersection of social justice and technology.