Bad News for Breitbart: The Web Is Coming Up With Ways to Kill Fake News
The sudden realization (well, sudden on the part of all the people who haven’t been hanging around here, bemoaning the state of political discourse in the U.S.) that Fake News and the Right-Wing Echo Chamber have driven a substantial portion of the population right straight out of their fucking minds …
… well, that realization is also spelled OPPORTUNITY.
There may or may not be any action taken by the traditional institutions that have a vested interest in good journalism, fact-based discussions, or any of those other characteristics of an actual healthy, functioning democracy. But the Free Market may actually step in and take action where they have no spine to do so.
An outfit calling itself DoubeVerify is offering a filter that will basically allow them to deny their ad placements on sites like the infamous Macedonian spammers, the yo-hos in Long Beach, or any of the other parasites making money off selling inflammatory lies to gullible angry white midwestern dipshits.
Viz:
The new offering from DV is the industry’s broadest effort yet to stem the flow of ad dollars that fund the ongoing support of these deceptive sites.
Traffic to several hundreds of these sites featuring fake news-like content has nearly doubled in the last month alone. These deceptive sites use inflammatory content to motivate millions of consumers to read and recirculate their stories to friends and family through social media. As a result, the sites are attracting significant ad dollars by posing as credible news and content sources. The new offering from DV provides advertisers with the transparency and protection they need to make fully informed media decisions.
I don’t know anything about DoubleVerify. I don’t know if their ownership is granola-crunchy or Koch-Brothers-front-group. I don’t know if their tool works, or if it’s even a bigger scam than the fake news sites are.
But as an initial move, it is getting attention from advertisers, who quite rightly, don’t want their products winding up on a neo-Nazi site like Breitbart, where they share space with pictures of Shlomo Shekelburg and the children of Jewish journalists being shoved into pizza ovens.
If the market realizes that this is indeed a problem, yes, there will be people trying to come up with a solution.
Our job is to keep making enough noise so that advertisers don’t want to support Fake News any more.