On the Infrastructure Providers That Support Misinformation Websites

Han, Catherine; Kumar, Deepak; Durumeric, Zakir

doi:10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19292

Cited by 11 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 8 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…They focused on traditional, fake news and low-quality news websites and found that fake news publishers interact with fewer ad servers than low-quality and traditional news websites, yet they still rely on credible ad servers to display ads and monetize their traffic. Similar results were found in [25], where the authors studied how Web infrastructure (e.g., hosting platforms, CDN providers, etc.) supports misinformation and hate speech websites.…”

Section: Related Worksupporting

confidence: 75%

“…Interestingly, we discover that RevContent, a popular ad system, is hiding as a publisher in other ad networks (e.g., mowplayer.com), while at the same time managing the ad inventory of 33 distinct fake news websites. Previous work has demonstrated that RevContent is popular among fake news websites [52] and that fake news websites mainly rely on Revcontent to generate revenue [25]. In total, we find 8 ad networks that manage at least 10 fake news websites each.…”

Section: Indirect Clientsmentioning

confidence: 80%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Leveraging Google’s Publisher-Specific IDs to Detect Website Administration

Papadogiannakis

Papadopoulos

Markatos

et al. 2022

Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Digital advertising is the most popular way for content monetization on the Internet. Publishers spawn new websites, and older ones change hands with the sole purpose of monetizing user traffic. In this ever-evolving ecosystem, it is challenging to effectively answer questions such as: Which entities monetize what websites? What categories of websites does an average entity typically monetize on and how diverse are these websites? How has this website administration ecosystem changed across time?In this paper, we propose a novel, graph-based methodology to detect administration of websites on the Web, by exploiting the ad-related publisher-specific IDs. We apply our methodology across the top 1 million websites and study the characteristics of the created graphs of website administration. Our findings show that approximately 90% of the websites are associated each with a single publisher, and that small publishers tend to manage less popular websites. We perform a historical analysis of up to 8 million websites, and find a new, constantly rising number of (intermediary) publishers that control and monetize traffic from hundreds of websites, seeking a share of the ad-market pie. We also observe that over time, websites tend to move from big to smaller administrators. CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → Web applications; Online advertising; Web mining.

show abstract

Section: Related Worksupporting

confidence: 75%

Section: Indirect Clientsmentioning

confidence: 80%

Leveraging Google’s Publisher-Specific IDs to Detect Website Administration

Papadogiannakis

Papadopoulos

Markatos

et al. 2022

Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As a main goal to get consumers' attention, Burkhardt proposes that advertisements appearing alongside a piece of information that is true or false can impact purchasing behavior. Given the appeal of gossip and scandal, as illustrated by media outlets such as the National Enquirer or Access Hollywood on TV, advertisers can thus profit off sensationalized and potentially misinformed claims (e.g., Han et al, 2022). Another fundamental concern is that advertisements themselves contain misinformation (Baker, 2018;Braun & Loftus, 1998;Glaeser & Ujhelyi, 2010;Hattori & Higashida, 2014;Rao, 2022;Zeng et al, 2020Zeng et al, , 2021.…”

Section: Societal-level Effects Of Misinformationmentioning

confidence: 99%

(Why) Is Misinformation a Problem?

Adams

Osman

Bechlivanidis

et al. 2023

Perspect Psychol Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the last decade there has been a proliferation of research on misinformation. One important aspect of this work that receives less attention than it should is exactly why misinformation is a problem. To adequately address this question, we must first look to its speculated causes and effects. We examined different disciplines (computer science, economics, history, information science, journalism, law, media, politics, philosophy, psychology, sociology) that investigate misinformation. The consensus view points to advancements in information technology (e.g., the Internet, social media) as a main cause of the proliferation and increasing impact of misinformation, with a variety of illustrations of the effects. We critically analyzed both issues. As to the effects, misbehaviors are not yet reliably demonstrated empirically to be the outcome of misinformation; correlation as causation may have a hand in that perception. As to the cause, advancements in information technologies enable, as well as reveal, multitudes of interactions that represent significant deviations from ground truths through people’s new way of knowing (intersubjectivity). This, we argue, is illusionary when understood in light of historical epistemology. Both doubts we raise are used to consider the cost to established norms of liberal democracy that come from efforts to target the problem of misinformation.

show abstract

“…One concern in misinformation research is that it has not accounted for ephemeral and inaccessible web-based misinformation. Many popular misinformation studies leverage lists of curated misinformation websites, but these websites are often unavailable or offline by the time studies are conducted (Han et al, 2022;Hanley et al, 2022;Hounsel et al, 2020). Internet measurement studies on misinformation often have to discard up to 50% of domains in these human-curated lists, highlighting a possibility for significant bias in collected results.…”

Section: Persistence Inaccessibility Ephemerality and The Study Of Mi...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying the Systematic Bias in the Accessibility and Inaccessibility of Web Scraping Content from URL-Logged Web-Browsing Digital Trace Data

Dahlke¹,

Kumar²,

Durumeric³

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Social scientists and computer scientists are increasingly using observational digital trace data and analyzing these data post hoc to understand the content people are exposed to online. However, these content collection efforts may be systematically biased when the entirety of the data cannot be captured retroactively. We call this unstated assumption the problematic assumption of persistence. To examine the extent to which this assumption may exist, we examine over 21 million URL-logged web browser visits from 1,515 participants over four months and record the degree to which hard news and misinformation URLs individuals visited were persistent, inaccessible, or ephemeral. While we find that the URLs collected are largely persistent, we find there are systematic biases in which URLs are ephemeral and inaccessible. For example, conservative misinformation URLs are more likely to be ephemeral than other types of misinformation. To standardize the reporting and understanding of the problematic assumption of persistence, we offer a set of metrics, PersistenceRate, InaccessibilityRate, EphemeralityRate (PIE metrics), that future research should report when using digital trace and web scraping data.

show abstract

On the Infrastructure Providers That Support Misinformation Websites

Cited by 11 publications

References 8 publications

Leveraging Google’s Publisher-Specific IDs to Detect Website Administration

Leveraging Google’s Publisher-Specific IDs to Detect Website Administration

(Why) Is Misinformation a Problem?

Quantifying the Systematic Bias in the Accessibility and Inaccessibility of Web Scraping Content from URL-Logged Web-Browsing Digital Trace Data

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About