news guard found, a lot of them are also benefitting from american technology and the placement of ads on those sites, notably google. now, a lot of the companies whose ads are appearing there don t know it and it s a result of something called programmatic advertising or algorithms which shove stuff their way, but nevertheless, there s big money to be made, and when it comes to the traction it s sort of getting, guys, take a look at a story the associated press put up a couple hours ago about how in this country, there are sites which are read by trump adherents, by qanon adherents and also covid-19 conspiracy theorists, which is relevant to us at news guard because a.p. wouldn t know, but the single biggest category of misinformation we have found in our three years ain t politics, nicole. it s health. and this was even before the pandemic started. and the sad bottom line, i think, is it s not just 70-year-old russians who pine for the old, great, mythological
days of the soviet union, and it s not just small-town trump adherents in this country. it s also pretty bright teenagers in big cities and fancy private schools and good public schools like my kids who don t really know the difference between the new york times and tiktok and don t know the difference between the nbc news site and sites that are spewing crazy misinformation such as infowars. there s a real difficult in differentiating between trustworthy and untrustworthy news sources. you know, frank figliuzzi, we have had conversations about disinformation in this country for as long as you and i have been speaking, and it seems that its application has been more and more disastrous, that it s going in the wrong direction. i mean, as jim s talking about, covid disinformation literally killed people in this country. disinformation about the election being stolen from the defeated ex-president led to a deadly insurrection. at the united states capitol. and now, disinformation is