Storyzys business is alerting brands to their presence on fake news sites. By and large, the advertising communitys response is simply appalling.
French startup Storyzy spotted six hundred forty-four brands on questionable sites ranging from hardcore hyper-partisan fake news sites to clickbait venues hosting bogus content with no particular agenda, except making a quick buck.
Storyzy showed me the list of brands that fund the fake news ecosystem, but didnt want Monday Note to publish it. Never mind. With 600+ advertisers, you can expect many household names to show up. And they do: tech companies, banks, retailers, airlines, cosmetic companies, luxury goods companies, universities, and NGOs. Reputed media brands ended up on hyper-partisan and fake news sites. As shown below, The New York Times was spotted on RealtimePolitics and The Wall Street Journal on Americas Freedom Fighters:
While some advertisers know and choose to turn a blind eye, most of the brands feeding the fake news industry do so completely unaware of their complicity.
In fact, they are caught in a combination of negligence and greed from media buyers and the cohort of intermediaries that rule the digital advertising sector.
The real surprise comes from the brands reaction once they are notified. Normally, one would expect most of them to take radical measures to notify the chain of intermediaries, such as media buyers or trading desks.
To alert advertisers caught on junk or blatant fake news sites, Storyzy sends them an email with eloquent screenshots attached.
We contacted about 400 brands, says Pierre-Albert Ruquier, marketing director and co-founder of Storyzy. Reaction varies. Some clearly dont care and dont even bother to respond. The biggest advertisers usually refer us to their media buying partners. We talk to most of them, even though we are often received coldly. Weirdly enough, we are also sent to large consulting firms that advise big clients on brand safety issues. The vast majority of advertisers dont know where their ads land. Or choose to ignore it. Thats why when they refer us to their media buying agency these wont budge. The reason is that almost all campaigns are ROI-based, a field dominated by behavioral targeting and retargeting.
In other words: Most of the brands dont really care where their ads show up as long as the overall return on investment is fine. One of the worlds largest hotel chains told us they dont mind showing up on questionable sites if it is the result of a retargeting process, which is a convenient way to say that, as long as they can invoke deniability, performance supersedes any damage caused to the brand, or ethical considerations such as fueling a vast network of misinformation. And if by chance the brand does care, they cant always trust intermediaries whose incentives are tied to the campaigns financial performance.
Such a combination of deniability and greed is toxic. It explains the millions of dollars that contribute to the well-being of a fake news/junk news system, one that needs not worry about survivability. (Misinformation media are, in addition, super efficient at maximizing bang for their own buck: their production costs are but a tiny fraction of those required for legit sites.)
Storyzy derived its current business from expertise in fact-checking that goes back to 2012. At the time, the startup was called Trooclick; its goal, using natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, was detecting false information in financial news.
Five years later, the initial product expanded to a more general quote verification system called Quote Verifier.
Currently, the service is available via a paid-for API (access to the web site, however, is free). This function is at the core of the companys fake news detection.
According to Ramon Ruti, CTO and co-founder of Storyzy, extracting quotes in a reliable fashionand being able to find and properly attribute indirect quotesis complex and requires layers of techniques: sentence splitting to detect misleading sentences boundaries like in certain acronyms; morphosyntactic analysis, to understand the nature of each word; topic and named entities extraction; reported speech extraction, for both direct and indirect speech; and other tweaks to deal with language ambiguity and newswriting imprecision.
Each day, Storyzy collects and sorts 50,000 new quotes in English lifted from 5,000 trusted and untrusted sources. The quote is a quintessential element of journalismespecially in the Anglo-Saxon world. Quotes are also the most often forged and the most hijacked items used by fake news sites. Even if a fake quote can be debunked in a matter of hours, the delay is largely sufficient for broad viral propagation on social nets. Hence the utility of the quote verifier to quickly pinpoint false information. Combined with other signals, it proves quite effective at fingering fake news sites.
Quotes also have great value for documentation purposes. Storyzy is currently building a private website for a global media brand to be used by journalists, fact-checkers, and moderators who will verify quotes, attribution, and context; the service will be plugged on the publishers CMS to warrant the accuracy of archived quotes.
For its brand safety-related business, Storyzy is just warming up. A few months ago, the company started to provide a list of 750 questionable websites to its customers, and more bad sites are added at a rate of 20~30 a month. Storyzy is also working on a full monitoring service to ensure brand safetyfor those who are interested.
Careless advertisers and media buyerss are actually harmful to everybody:
This post originally appeared at Monday Note. Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.
Visit link:
- Green with Envy | How to Spot an Eco-Snob | Part III - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- EcoLogo - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- 5 Ways to Green Your Exercise Routine - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Seed Bombs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Guerrilla gardening - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Green Your Morning Routine - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Environmental Benefits of Telecommuting - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Safeway Sponsors Portland Community Cleanup - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Electric Vehicle Race - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Portland Bridge Pedal 2009 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- E-waste in Oregon - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Bike Sharing in Portland - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Bucks for the Bay Challenge - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Drive to Make a Difference with MyMPG - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Bathroom Sprayers - Green your Toilet Routine - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ubuntu OS can Save Energy - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Green Metropolis, David Owen - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Sustainable Pens: GLO Pens - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- International Day of Climate Action - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Donate to Oregon Toxics Alliance - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Biomass Energy Generation Myths - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Crude The Real Price of Oil | Playing in Portland - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Pictures From 350 Climate Day in Portland - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Arcimoto Electric Vehicles in Oregon - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Urban Rooftop Wind Turbines - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Chromium 6 Emissions from ESCO in Portland - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Food Inc. Review - December 19th, 2009 [December 19th, 2009]
- Making Maps with Google Earth and Google Maps by Shane Bradt of the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension - March 23rd, 2010 [March 23rd, 2010]
- Demonstration of Miradi 3.1 by Nick Salafsky of Foundations of Success - March 23rd, 2010 [March 23rd, 2010]
- Advanced Mashups – KML and the Mapping API by Cary Chadwick of the University of Connecticut Center for Land Use Education and Research - March 23rd, 2010 [March 23rd, 2010]
- Demonstration of InVEST by Heather Tallis of the Natural Capital Project - March 23rd, 2010 [March 23rd, 2010]
- GIS Maps Online by Emily Wilson of the University of Connecticut Center for Land Use Education and Research - March 23rd, 2010 [March 23rd, 2010]
- From ArcGIS to Web Maps: Simple Techniques for Publishing GIS Maps Online by Emily Wilson of the University of Connecticut Center for Land Use Education and Research - March 25th, 2010 [March 25th, 2010]
- Demonstration of Marine InVEST by Anne Guerry of the Natural Capital Project - March 31st, 2010 [March 31st, 2010]
- Eliminate and Decrease Styrofoam - March 31st, 2010 [March 31st, 2010]
- Portland Plans to Spend $600 million on Master Bike Plan - April 2nd, 2010 [April 2nd, 2010]
- (Webinar in Spanish) Demostración sobre Vista 2.5 de NatureServe en línea (Webinar) por Ian Varley, Carmen Josse, y Alexandra Sanchez de Lozada de NatureServe. - April 6th, 2010 [April 6th, 2010]
- Using and Adding Your Content to Google Ocean by Charlotte Vick, Google Content Manager of Mission Blue - April 13th, 2010 [April 13th, 2010]
- End Paper Receipts - May 1st, 2010 [May 1st, 2010]
- Demonstration of CanVis by Chris Haynes of NOAA Coastal Services Center - May 6th, 2010 [May 6th, 2010]
- Demonstration of HD.gov Web Portal by Jeff Adkins from NOAA Coastal Services Center - May 13th, 2010 [May 13th, 2010]
- Demonstration of Ecosystem Assessment and Reporting Tool by Steve Schill of The Nature Conservancy - May 13th, 2010 [May 13th, 2010]
- Demonstration of Version 2.0 of the Multipurpose Marine Cadastre by Adam Bode and Brian Smith of NOAA Coastal Services Center - May 17th, 2010 [May 17th, 2010]
- CRUDE Filmmakers Subpoenaed by Chevron - May 22nd, 2010 [May 22nd, 2010]
- Demonstration of the Digital Coast Coastal Inundation Toolkit by Steph Beard, Jodie Sprayberry and Billy Brooks of NOAA Coastal Services Center - May 25th, 2010 [May 25th, 2010]
- Presentation on the Creating Resilient Communities EBM Tool Demonstration Project by Jocelyn Hittle of PlaceMatters - June 10th, 2010 [June 10th, 2010]
- Presentation on Economic Data Needed for EBM by Linwood Pendleton of Duke University - October 11th, 2010 [October 11th, 2010]
- Recycling Water - October 16th, 2010 [October 16th, 2010]
- ODOT Partners with Oregon Toxics Alliance to Reduce Pesticides - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- Goats Hired to Mow Portland Lot - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- A World of Health: Connecting People, Place, and Planet - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- Alternative Recycling Options - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- No More Bullying the Bull Trout - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- 1000+ EV Charging Stations Slated for Oregon I-5 Corridor - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- The Vertical Farm Concept - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- Blog Action Day 2010 | Water - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- Eco Districts - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Will The Nissan Leaf Thrive? - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- A Green Railroad - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Biomass is not Oregon's clean-energy future as currently promoted - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Electrified Parking Spaces - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Tree Planting - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Three Tips to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint and Live Longer. - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Biomass is not Oregon’s clean-energy future as currently promoted - October 31st, 2010 [October 31st, 2010]
- Rail~Volution - October 31st, 2010 [October 31st, 2010]
- Green Streets Initiative - October 31st, 2010 [October 31st, 2010]
- Mayor Kitty Piercy and Envision Eugene - November 7th, 2010 [November 7th, 2010]
- The Willamette River Transit Bridge - November 13th, 2010 [November 13th, 2010]
- Collaborative Learning and Land Use Tools to Support Community Based Ecosystem Management by Chris Feurt of the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve - November 14th, 2010 [November 14th, 2010]
- Portland Federal Building Begins Green Makeover - November 14th, 2010 [November 14th, 2010]
- Vestas’ New HQ in Portland Shoots for LEED Platinum - November 14th, 2010 [November 14th, 2010]
- College Degrees to Get You in the Environmental Field - November 14th, 2010 [November 14th, 2010]
- Demonstration of openNSPECT, an Open Source Version of the Nonpoint-Source Pollution and Erosion Comparison Tool by Dave Eslinger of NOAA Coastal Services Center - February 14th, 2011 [February 14th, 2011]
- Demonstration of EMDS by Keith Reynolds of the US Forest Service - February 14th, 2011 [February 14th, 2011]
- Demonstration of Habitat Priority Planner by Chrissa Waite and Danielle Bamford of NOAA Coastal Services Center - February 14th, 2011 [February 14th, 2011]
- Presentation on the Coastal Adaptation to Sea Level Rise Tool (COAST) by Sam Merrill of the New England Environmental Finance Center - February 14th, 2011 [February 14th, 2011]
- Presentation on the Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard by Kathy Goodin of NatureServe - February 14th, 2011 [February 14th, 2011]
- Demonstration of Coral Reef Scenario Evaluation Tool (CORSET) by Jessica Melbourne-Thomas of the University of Tasmania - February 14th, 2011 [February 14th, 2011]
- Demonstration of Multi-scale Integrated Models of Ecosystem Services (MIMES) by Roel Boumans and David McNally of AFORDable Futures LLC - February 14th, 2011 [February 14th, 2011]
- Creating Life in the Desert - February 14th, 2011 [February 14th, 2011]