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GENEVA
Hard news about humanitarian and social issues is being treated as toxic by overzealous ad technology, undermining corporate social responsibility and effectively punishing publishers for reporting on international crises, researchers say.
Take the winning of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. This was big news for the World Food Programme, but ad technology scanning for gloomy keywords like “famine” and “conflict” meant that big advertisers shied away from it on major media sites: An upbeat NBC article about WFP’s win was boycotted automatically by dozens of advertisers.
This is just one example revealed by new research on the hidden rules of ad tech. By examining the code of public web pages, analyst Krzysztof Franaszek has compiled hundreds of previously unseen “blocklists” connected to advertisers, containing some 7,000 distinct words and phrases – evidence of what critics say is excessive caution about “br