Tech giants stop advertisers using fake news clickbait

Modern giants Google and Facebook decided to stop their ad platforms as they are more and more frequently used by scammers to earn on fake news.

This decision makes the corporations free from blaming for making money with the help of fake stories that made the US election campaign dirtier that it actually was.

The bans on the fake news will help filter the inappropriate content, because those stories aren’t the political view of the people who write them, they are made just for money.

For example, there’s a group of teenagers from Veles (Macedonia) who were earning on writing fake pro-Trump news for webzines like USA Daily Politics.com. Such websites were created for radical right-wingers to prove their most scary prejudices. The kids confirmed they were given $5,000 a month, but could also make it $3,000 a day if they wrote something extraordinarily outrageous, like the news about Pope Francis ban for Catholic people to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Following claims that a barrage of these stories tipped the election for Donald Trump, Google said that it would bar fake news publishers from using its AdSense platform. AdSense, used by about two million publishers, shows ads to website visitors based on factors such as geographical location.

Facebook then moved to bar fake news from its own advertising platform, although it said that the ban was already in place and it was only making the rules explicit. The Facebook Audience Network allows content owners to run targeted ads that match site visitors to their Facebook profiles and claims three million advertisers worldwide.

Facebook staff have formed an unofficial task force to address the role that fake news stories played in influencing the US election. Sources told Buzzfeed News that the group had met in secret twice and planned to make recommendations to bosses, although they were working incognito for fear of losing their jobs.

They are said to disagree with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, who said the idea that fake news on the site influenced the election result was “pretty crazy”. Salacious fake stories were said to have been promoted by Facebook’s algorithms, which favour clickbait. Other sources said senior executives had shown disquiet at the claims of Facebook’s role and were taking it more seriously than Mr Zuckerberg’s words suggested.