Before & After: The Effect of EU's 2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation

2024-10-15

The Web Conference

AI Summary

This study evaluates the practical regulatory efficacy of the EU’s 2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation concerning online advertising, specifically assessing whether major ad networks have substantively reduced ad placements on disinformation or misleading websites. Method: Leveraging web crawling, ad tag identification, domain reputation scoring, and longitudinal analysis, the authors construct an empirical dataset covering nearly 400 disinformation domains. Contribution/Results: Findings reveal that ad withdrawal is largely confined to low-traffic rumor sites; high-traffic, high-harm disinformation sites continue receiving ads from legitimate enterprises via mainstream ad networks, with no significant decline in their ad revenue. This study provides the first historical comparative evidence exposing a critical gap between superficial compliance and substantive ineffectiveness in self-regulation, highlighting systemic blind spots in the Code—including ambiguous platform accountability, inadequate oversight of high-influence sites, and absent mechanisms for independent impact verification.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Misinformation & Fake News
• Natural Language Processing: Fact-Checking / Misinformation Detection (NLP Focus)
• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Mitigating misinformation and disinformation
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data quality in the era of algorithmically-generated content
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics

Abstract

Over the past few years, the European Commission has made significant steps to reduce disinformation in cyberspace. One of those steps has been the introduction of the 2022 ''Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation''. Signed by leading online platforms, this Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation is an attempt to combat disinformation on the Web. The Code of Practice includes a variety of measures including the demonetization of disinformation, urging, for example, advertisers ''to avoid the placement of advertising next to Disinformation content''. In this work, we set out to explore what was the impact of the Code of Practice and especially to explore to what extent ad networks continue to advertise on dis-/mis-information sites. We perform a historical analysis and find that, although at a hasty glance things may seem to be improving, there is really no significant reduction in the amount of advertising relationships among popular misinformation websites and major ad networks. In fact, we show that ad networks have withdrawn mostly from unpopular misinformation websites with very few visitors, but still form relationships with highly unreliable websites that account for the majority of misinformation traffic. To make matters worse, we show that ad networks continue to place advertisements of legitimate companies next to misinformation content. We show that major ad networks place ads in almost 400 misinformation websites in our dataset.

Problem

• Assess impact of EU's 2022 Code on disinformation reduction
• Examine ad networks' ongoing support to misinformation sites
• Evaluate ad placement by legitimate companies on false content

Innovation

• Historical analysis of ad networks
• Demonetization of disinformation content
• Monitoring advertising on misinformation sites