San Francisco (The Hawk): According to a ProPublica investigation, Google is purportedly making disinformation profitable through its ad tactics for some of the Internet's most prolific providers of misleading information in Europe, Latin America, and Africa.
The investigation, the first of its kind, discovered that Google's vast automated digital ad operation distributed advertising from big corporations on global websites that disseminated false claims about vaccines, Covid-19, climate warming, and elections.
The ProPublica study also discovered that Google routinely inserts adverts on sites in French, German, and Spanish-speaking nations spreading myths about Covid-19 and climate change.
"The ensuing ad revenue is potentially worth millions of dollars to the persons and organisations running this and other untrustworthy sites – while simultaneously making money for Google," according to a Saturday report.
Google ads are more likely to display next to incorrect content on issues not explicitly addressed in its policy, such as crime, politics, and conspiracy theories like chemtrails.
A former Google executive who worked on trust and safety concerns admitted that the internet behemoth concentrates mainly on English-language enforcement and is weaker in other languages and smaller areas.
ProPublica examined over 13,000 live article pages from thousands of websites in over a half-dozen languages to see if they were currently collecting ad money through Google.
According to the investigation, Google put advertising on 41% of the nearly 800 active web articles rated as incorrect by members of the Poynter Institute's International Fact-Checking Network.
"The corporation also delivered advertising on 20% of climate change publications that Science Feedback, an IFCN-accredited fact-checking organisation, labelled fake," according to the report.
According to a corporate representative, Google has increased its investment in non-English language enforcement and oversight, which has resulted in an increase in the amount of advertising removed on pages that break its policies.
"We've created comprehensive procedures to combat disinformation on our platform, including policies covering elections, Covid-19, and climate change, and we work to enforce these policies in over 50 languages," according to a company spokeswoman.
(Inputs from Agencies)
