Before & After: The Effect of EU's 2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation

TL;DR

This study evaluates the impact of the EU's 2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation, revealing limited effectiveness in reducing advertising on misinformation sites and ongoing placement of ads alongside disinformation content.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of ad network behaviors before and after the Code, highlighting persistent advertising on high-traffic misinformation sites despite policy measures.

Findings

No significant reduction in advertising on misinformation sites.

Ad networks withdrew mainly from low-traffic misinformation websites.

Major ad networks still place ads on nearly 400 misinformation websites.

Abstract

Over the past few years, the European Commission has made significant steps to reduce disinformation in cyberspace. One of those steps has been the introduction of the 2022 "Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation". Signed by leading online platforms, this Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation is an attempt to combat disinformation on the Web. The Code of Practice includes a variety of measures including the demonetization of disinformation, urging, for example, advertisers "to avoid the placement of advertising next to Disinformation content". In this work, we set out to explore what was the impact of the Code of Practice and especially to explore to what extent ad networks continue to advertise on dis-/mis-information sites. We perform a historical analysis and find that, although at a hasty glance things may seem to be improving, there is really no significant reduction in the amount of advertising relationships among popular misinformation websites and major ad networks. In fact, we show that ad networks have withdrawn mostly from unpopular misinformation websites with very few visitors, but still form relationships with highly unreliable websites that account for the majority of misinformation traffic. To make matters worse, we show that ad networks continue to place advertisements of legitimate companies next to misinformation content. We show that major ad networks place ads in almost 400 misinformation websites in our dataset.