Executive Summary:
While misinformation related to COVID-19 has been causing vast economic and health damages, questionable websites are taking advantage of online advertising systems – publishing falsehoods and harmful claims. Our study finds that through the opacity of ad networks, thousands of brands are unknowingly funding these stories.
Our study aims to answer 3 main questions:
Who is spreading false stories – during the last 2 months we tracked 1000 of questionable sites with a history of publishing false claims
What are the main narratives in these stories – to identify groups of common narratives we analyzed the keywords of disinformation stories using semantic text models and psycho-linguistic features that capture manipulative language
Who is funding the ads next to these stories – to understand which platforms are serving these ads we extracted unique identifiers from HTML source code and network data
COVID19 Disinformation: Ads Funding by Popular Brands
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