Via The Atlantic:
It just got harder for fake-news websites to make money from ads. Within hours of each other on Monday evening, Facebook and Google both announced that sites that intentionally deceive or mislead visitors won’t be allowed to use the internet giants’ advertising platforms.
Google’s AdSense and the Facebook Audience Network allow websites to easily place digital ads on their pages. Instead of going out and selling ads on their own, websites can lean on Google and Facebook to do that legwork for them. The networks act as middlemen, allowing online advertisers to “bid” for space on websites that have signed up. Google and Facebook share some of the revenue from the ads with the websites that run them.
Google said Monday that it will no longer allow websites access to its ad network if they “misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose.” Pornography or hate-speech websites are already banned from using the AdSense platform.
Who might they consider as ‘fake news’? Well, coincidentally, a professor put out a list of websites she judged to be fake, and that list has been getting wide play in conjunction with the Google/Facebook story. It does list some ‘real’ fake news sites, like ‘Abcnews.com.co’ which pretends to be an ABC site. The list notes satirical websites like the Onion because ‘people might not get it’s satirical’. But it also lists conservative websites like Twitchy, Breitbart, and Biz Pac Review.
