Market Forces: Quantifying the Role of Top Credible Ad Servers in the Fake News Ecosystem
Market Forces: Quantifying the Role of Top Credible Ad Servers in the Fake News Ecosystem
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DOI：
10.2139/ssrn.3650585
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发表时间：
2020-07
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Lia Bozarth;Ceren Budak
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Lia Bozarth;Ceren Budak
拉里·莱西格（Larry Lessig）认为，网络空间中的行为有四种模式：法律、市场、规范和架构。这四种模式如何规范假新闻的生产和传播？在本文中，我们关注市场，并实证评估了一个特定的基于市场的解决方案：顶级广告公司将假新闻生产者列入黑名单，以消除其收入来源。我们的研究表明，与具有相似知名度和年龄的传统新闻媒体相比，虚假和低质量的出版商更倾向于投放更多广告，并与风险广告服务器合作。然而，假新闻出版商仍然严重依赖可靠的广告服务器。事实上，仅排名前10位的可信广告服务器就分别占据了虚假和低质量广告流量的66.7%和55.6%。此外，我们的粗略计算显示，在我们收集数据时，排名前十的广告公司每月从假新闻网站的网络流量中获得9.857万至115万美元的收入，这在这些公司的年收入中只占很小的一部分。总的来说，我们的研究结果表明，让顶级广告公司将已知的虚假和低质量出版商列入黑名单是一种低成本的打击假新闻的方法。
Larry Lessig argues that four modes regulate behavior in cyberspace: laws, markets, norms, and architecture. How can these four modes regulate the production and spread of fake news? In this paper, we focus on markets and empirically evaluate one particular market-based solution: top ad firms blacklisting fake news producers to eliminate their revenue sources. Our study reveals that fake and low-quality publishers demonstrate a higher tendency to serve more ads and to partner with risky ad servers than traditional news media with similar popularity and age. However, fake news publishers are still strongly reliant on credible ad servers. In fact, the top-10 credible ad servers alone account for 66.7% and 55.6% of fake and low-quality ad traffic respectively. Furthermore, our back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that, at the time of our data collection, the top-10 ad firms were receiving $985.7K to $1.15M monthly from web traffic on fake news sites, a negligible fraction of these firms' annual revenue. Overall, our findings suggest that having top ad firms blacklist known fake and low-quality publishers is a low-cost way to combat fake news.