How Digital Advertising Amplifies Fake News: The Socio-Technical Imaginaries of Programmatic Advertising

Digital advertising is deeply woven into our online experiences. But beneath its glossy surface lies a troubling phenomenon: digital advertising has become a significant vehicle for bankrolling the spread of misinformation online. As brands spend more money on digital channels, their budgets are increasingly siphoned into provocative and controversial content, including fake news. I examined this trend in my latest publication on ”Fake news and digital advertising,” which explores the narratives that enable digital marketers to skirt their responsibility for how their budgets are used.

The study explains how marketing agencies create "socio-technical imaginaries" that depict harmful outcomes, including disinformation, as unfortunate but unavoidable by-products—externalities, in economic terms—of digital advertising. By framing these negative impacts as merely incidental, marketing agencies distance themselves from any responsibility for the content they help promote. This detachment allows agencies and brands to ignore the broader consequences of their work, leaving misinformation to proliferate unchecked.

Conceptually, the study distinguishes between economic externalities and sociotechnical overflows. Economic externalities are seen as unrelated side effects of markets, like pollution from factories. However, overflows are socio-technical outcomes that emerge from the market, and thus, overflows can be corrected. The study suggests that fake news is not an accidental by-product—economic externalities—but, instead, a direct overflow of the digital advertising ecosystem; in other words, the fact that digital ads support misinformation and incendiary content makes this content more likely. Recognizing this relationship could pave the way to addressing these harmful effects more directly.

The paper calls for accountability from digital marketers and the brands they work for. The study argues that digital marketing professionals must acknowledge their roles in enabling and amplifying these harmful outcomes. Marketers can mitigate the negative impacts of their practices by taking responsibility and establishing more explicit oversight over AdTech intermediaries.

Diaz Ruiz, C. A. (2024). Disinformation and fake news as externalities of digital advertising: a close reading of sociotechnical imaginaries in programmatic advertising. Journal of Marketing Management, 1–23.