How can advertisers stop funding online hate and disinformation?
Advertising spending on social media is projected to reach $219.8 billion in 2024 worldwide. Brands are increasingly turning to social media to promote their products and services, encouraged by these platforms’ offer of detailed information about their billions of users. Unlike TV or radio advertising, access to user data on social media allows brands to run hyper-targeted ads that make their campaigns more effective.
Advertising accounts for most social media companies’ revenues. In 2020, almost 98% of Facebook’s global revenue came from advertising. As lucrative as this business model can be, advertising on social media comes with the risk of ads appearing next to harmful and controversial, addictive or harmful content.
Advertisers are the real customers of social media platforms – and users are their product. People who are on social media are bombarded with controversial, harmful and addictive content to keep them hooked to these platforms. Their attention (or engagement) is quantified and sold to advertisers, feeding a business model that is based on the algorithmic amplification of hate, disinformation, and extreme content.
As the most powerful group that can influence platform decision-making, advertisers can pressure social media companies to stop amplifying harmful content that can damage young people’s mental health, climate action and democracy.
In this article, you will learn about how social media companies’ business model works, what advertisers can do to avoid funding online hate and misinformation, why failing to act can seriously damage their brand reputation, and why us users should care.
How do social media companies make money?
Social media companies like Meta, Twitter/X and TikTok have created a business model in which they monetize billions of users’ behavior by selling this data to advertisers – a process that is opaque and raises serious ethical questions.
Essentially, platforms gather vast amounts of data on people’s actions: they record every time someone clicks on a link, watches a video, or engages with a specific post. The lack of transparency makes it hard to establish the full extent of data collected.
This data helps social media platforms’ algorithms predict which content will engage users, allowing advertisers to target specific groups more effectively – increasing ad performance and conversion rates.
The process of serving consumers ads based on tracking their online activity is known as behavioral advertising, which is often opaque about how it handles user data.
To provide detailed user data to advertisers, social media companies need users to be active on their platforms. So, their algorithms push highly engaging content to people’s feeds, aiming to maximize not only engagement but also the time and attention spent on their platform.
In their effort to capture eyeballs, these algorithms often boost extreme and controversial content that – because they play with people’s emotions and biases – are more likely to have high engagement rates and go viral.
Despite having policies in place designed to prevent amplifying harmful content, popular social media platforms have been slashing content moderation teams responsible for enforcing their own rules. Social media policies are often flexible and don’t encompass a wide range of online harms, allowing harmful content to remain live on the platform.
As a result, advertisers are inadvertently funding a business model that encourages the spread and amplification of online hate and disinformation. Extreme content, hate and disinformation are amplified on social media and fed to people, fueling outrage, polarization, and sometimes leading to offline violence.
Why should advertisers care?
On top of the ethical issue of funding platforms that feed hate and misinformation to users, advertisers should be concerned about the potential reputational fallout of placing ads next to harmful content.
Strategies for brand safety – actions to avoid unsafe advertising environments to protect brand reputation – and brand suitability – placing ads in the right environments – are now crucial for advertising campaigns.
Ad adjacency – ads placed next to harmful content – is part of a bigger structural problem of social media platforms not being transparent about how they display ads.
CCDH’s research has shown how big brands’ ads can be placed near divisive and harmful content. In April 2024, we found ads for the NBA and Oreo on Twitter/X near anti-Jewish and anti-Palestinian posts. This content was published by accounts that exploit the Israel-Gaza conflict to boost their own audiences.
In March 2023, we found that Elon Musk’s Twitter could serve ads for Disney+, Amazon’s Kindle, the NBA and other brands near posts from five accounts responsible for promoting the hateful conspiracy theory that the LGBTQ+ community is guilty of ‘grooming’ children.
In January 2024, our study showed that Google’s YouTube is making up to $13.4 million a year from ads on channels promoting climate denial. We identified ads for Hilton and the charity Save the Children on videos undermining climate science and solutions.
Social media platforms are not the only online channels where ads can be placed near extreme content. Our Stop Funding Misinformation campaign showed that Google was placing Ads on websites known for spreading racist hate, climate change denial, and disinformation about COVID-19 and the 2020 US Presidential elections, which means that advertisers were inadvertently funding the spread of harmful misinformation.
Pressure from our Stop Funding Misinformation campaign helped push Google to remove ads from prominent disinformation websites such as ZeroHedge, Electroverse, and Gateway Pundit.
Why should users care?
Everyone who has an account on a social media platform automatically becomes part of this business model. Even if unaware, users are helping social media companies make money when they spend time on their platforms and engage with other users’ content.
But it doesn’t stop there. Social media platforms’ algorithms push hate, disinformation, and extreme content to people’s timeline because controversy and outrage generate engagement. This way, people are being manipulated into spending more and more time glued to their screens, allowing these platforms to sell their data to advertisers.
The amplification of harmful content comes at the expense of people’s mental health and can negatively impact people’s trust in science and established institutions. This can lead to serious consequences in the offline world, delaying climate solutions and threatening democracy.
To learn how to navigate social media in times of crisis, take a look at our explainer.
How can brands avoid having an ad placed near hate and disinformation?
Advertisers may not always be aware that their ads are funding harmful content. The digital advertising landscape has grown to be a complex supply chain that involves layers of intermediate companies separating the advertiser from the publisher, making it increasingly difficult to monitor ad campaigns.
Programmatic advertising, where algorithms place ads with minimal human oversight, compounds this issue. Check My Ads argues that advertisers should actively seek control of ad placement data by asking ad vendors for more detailed reports, and regularly auditing ads data.
The Conscious Advertising Network recommends that companies develop policies to establish how to deal with misinformation or disinformation appearing near their ads and how to address sensitivities around protected and diverse groups.
Moving away from keyword blocklists, it can be helpful for companies to create a list of keywords they would like to see next to their ads (a keyword whitelist). This way, advertisers can avoid defunding high-quality journalism.
Despite not being foolproof, social media and search engine platforms offer filters to help advertisers avoid having their ads appear near harmful or sensitive content. These filters allow advertisers to select preferred safety levels, topic and publisher exclusion, and keywords block lists. Read more about each platform’s approach to brand safety mechanisms:
What can social media companies and policymakers do to create a safer environment for advertisers (and for everyone else)?
- Social media companies must enforce their own policies against misinformation and hate speech and invest in trust and safety staff dedicated to safeguarding against harmful content.
- Platforms must improve their ad placement mechanisms and tools for advertisers to stop ads funding hate and disinformation.
- Advertisers must demand transparency from platforms on where ad dollars go.
- Regulators should ensure that social media platforms have comprehensive, searchable public ad libraries available to researchers.
How can advertisers contribute to healthier online spaces?
The advertising industry has significant influence over social media platforms. Social media platforms’ business model depends on advertising to thrive, which gives advertisers the unique power to make sure their money is not being used to amplify harmful content and to improve platform safety.
In 2021, pressure from civil society and advertisers drove Google to update its ads policy to prohibit “ads for, and monetisation of, content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.” This was an important first step, but our research has shown that Google’s policy now needs to be updated to include new forms of climate denial.
Following the Stop Hate for Profit campaign that involved an advertising boycott of more than a thousand companies in 2020, Facebook made commitments to strengthen and enforce civil rights protections. Boycotts are temporary solutions to a problem that can only be solved through greater accountability of social media companies and transparency of where ads are being displayed and what kind of content they are funding.
Advertising is a vital lever in the fight for a safer online world. Social media companies depend heavily on the revenue generated ad revenue, and brands have the unique opportunity to be agents for change.
CCDH is working to expose social media platforms that allow ads to fund hate and disinformation. We will continue to work with advertisers to ensure their values are represented when platforms refuse to act. Join our email community to stay up-to-date with our work.