Google’s ad practices on non-English-language websites are making disinformation profitable, a new investigation has found.
ProPublica, a nonprofit organisation based in New York City, conducted an analysis of Google’s ad practices and found that the tech giant is “funnelling revenue to some of the web’s most prolific purveyors of false information in Europe, Latin America and Africa”. Google’s automated digital ad operation placed ads from major brands on global websites that spread misleading information about COVID-19, vaccines, elections, and climate change, according to the investigation.
The report adds that Google ads are a major source of profits for websites that spread election disinformation in Brazil. The tech giant also places ads on web pages that propagate lies about climate change and COVID-19 in French-, German- and Spanish-speaking countries.
“The resulting ad revenue is potentially worth millions of dollars to the people and groups running these and other unreliable sites — while also making money for Google.”
The investigation involved ProPublica scanning more than 13,000 articles, using data provided by fact-checking newsrooms, researchers, and monitoring organisations, to determine whether the pages spreading false information were still earning ad revenue with Google.
Google placed ads on 41 per cent of roughly 800 active articles that were found to be spreading misleading claims about COVID-19, and 20 per cent on pieces about climate change that were rated false by fact-checking organisations. A number of articles ProPublica reviewed were published months or years ago, laying bare Google’s failure to block ads on content with false information.
“Platforms such as Facebook have faced stark criticism for failures to crack down on disinformation spread by people and governments on their platforms around the world,” the report says. “But Google hasn’t faced the same scrutiny for how its roughly $200 billion in annual ad sales provides essential funding for non-English-language websites that misinform and harm the public.”
In response to ProPublica’s investigation, Google Spokesperson Michael Aciman said the tech giant has invested more in the enforcement and oversight of non-English languages.
“We’ve developed extensive measures to tackle misinformation on our platform, including policies that cover elections, COVID-19 and climate change, and work to enforce our policies in over 50 languages,” said Aciman. “In 2021, we removed ads from more than 1.7 billion publisher pages and 63,000 sites globally. We know that our work is not done, and we will continue to invest in our enforcement systems to better detect unreliable claims and protect users around the world.”
Aciman did not, however, provide figures for non-English-language content and ad reviewers working at Google.
