Disinformation thrived on Google and Facebook because it served their revenue imperatives.

Evidence

As radical indifference would predict, however, “fake news” and other forms of information corruption have been perennial features of Google and Facebook’s online environments. There are countless examples of disinformation that survived and even thrived because it fulfilled economic imperatives, and I point out just a few. In 2007 a prominent financial analyst worried that the subprime mortgage bust would harm Google’s lucrative ad business. It seems a strange observation until you learn that in the years prior to the Great Recession, Google eagerly welcomed shady subprime lenders into its behavioral futures markets, anxious to net the lion’s share of the 200 million in monthly revenue that mortgage lenders were spending on online advertising. A 2011 Consumer Watchdog report on Google’s advertising practices leading up to and during the Great Recession concluded that “Google has been a prominent beneficiary of the national home loan and foreclosure crisis… by accepting deceptive advertising from fraudulent operators who falsely promise unwary consumers that they can solve their mortgage and credit problems.” Despite these increasingly public facts, Google continued to serve its fraudulent business customers until 2011, when the US Treasury Department finally required the company to suspend advertising relationships with “more than 500 internet advertisers associated with the 85 alleged online mortgage fraud schemes and related deceptive advertising.” … Only a few months earlier, the Department of Justice had fined Google 500 million, “one of the largest financial forfeiture penalties in history,” for accepting ads from online Canadian pharmacies that encouraged Google’s US users to illegally import controlled drugs, despite repeated warnings. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1612

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader argument about radical indifference in the previous chapter and to the prediction-market economics of surveillance capitalism. — connects to: Investor pressure forced Google and Facebook to intensify advertising against their original ideals. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1086
• SHARE: The $200 million monthly subprime-ad revenue figure and the forced 500-advertiser suspension would be worth sending to anyone working on platform accountability or ad-tech economics.

Broader Connections

• Investor pressure forced Google and Facebook to intensify advertising against their original ideals. #expands (0.80) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1086