Identifying the Ad firms and Retailers that Support Low-Credibility News Producers
Join this LSE Data Science Institute guest lecture with Dr Ceren Budak to discover the role that markets play in the disinformation ecosystem
The role that markets play in the disinformation ecosystem is generally overlooked and yet significant. Our ability to curb misinformation depends, at least partially, on understanding and changing these market incentive mechanisms. How can we make meaningful progress in this direction? The first step is to understand the role different market forces play here. In this talk, we will take that first step, focusing on display advertising. We will quantify the degree to which ad firms and advertisers support producers of misinformation through display advertising. By using data continuously collected on ads served on low and high credibility news sites, we will discuss (a) which ad firms and advertisers are uniquely responsible for supporting misinformation sites, (b) how these patterns are changing over time, and (c) how different ad-firm or retailer centric strategies to curb misinformation is likely to reshape the disinformation ecosystem.
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Speaker biography
Ceren Budak is an Associate Professor at the School of Information at the University of Michigan.
Her research interests lie in the area of computational social science. She utilizes network science, machine learning, and crowdsourcing methods and draws from scientific knowledge across multiple social science communities to contribute computational methods to the field of political communication.