In my new role, I'll be leading research, campaigns, and programs that advance our mission of bringing transparency and accountability to the digital ad industry, ending surveillance advertising, and reclaiming our rights to make informed choices for ourselves.
Arielle made her debut as part of Check My Ads at this week’s Wall Street Journal CMO Network summit, where she told attendees how they can stop paying for bad data to reach fake people on unsafe websites, and maybe save democracy in the process.
Like she told CMOs: "Look, we’re going to keep fighting for your right to check your ads; and we’ll get there a lot faster if you speak with your dollars and demand full transparency into what your ads are funding and where they’re running.” 🔥🔥🔥
Development Director Natasha Commissiong, left, and Arielle Garcia at the WSJ CMO Network Summit.
And speaking of Arielle, she and Sarah Kay Wiley, our Policy Director, broke down some of the issues with the American Privacy Rights Act.
At least 60 countries have national elections this year. There’s evidence of continued democratic backsliding and rising authoritarianism across the globe.
That’s why we’ve signed a letter, with more than 200 other civil society organizations and journalists, requesting platforms including Meta, Discord, Google, and Reddit step up their integrity efforts to protect democracy in 2024.
We’re asking them to, among other things:
🔐 Invest in greater platform integrity
👮 Enforce rules against election lies and hate in political advertising
🥸 Prohibit the use of deepfakes in political ads
🤳Hold influencer, public figure, and political candidate accounts to the same moderation and enforcement standards as everyone else
📊 Improve transparency and enable civil society oversight of enforcement practices by regularly sharing virality and enforcement reports
WSJ took a look at online publishers who drain ad spend with rapidly refreshing ads, bot clicks, and clickbait headlines. And while the article positions MFA sites as a “messy situation” worth debating, Nandini posted her much stronger opinion on LinkedIn.
Last week, The WSJ (a lot of WSJ today!) reported on how Forbes ran ads meant for Forbes.com on a spammy copycat site. Reacting to the story, Omar Oakes of The Media Leader writes, “If global publishers feel the need to spoof their own websites to sell garbage ad inventory, it means the state of online advertising is in even worse shape than many realize.”
A new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate shows how accounts are using hate as a growth hack — and X is profiting off it.
That’s all from us for this week. Expect some ~fun~ next week — it seems a major ad exchange is funding a toxic disinformation site, even after other advertisers and exchanges dropped it 🤔
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