Moat to develop metric to help stop ad dollars to fake news sites
Digital ad search engine Moat is developing a metric to integrate with automated ad buying systems in a bid to cut off ad dollars to fake news sites. Much of online advertising is automated, meaning that cash often goes to fake news websites without the brands themselves knowing. Moat has developed an anti-fake news filter which can quickly identify web traffic. It then works with journalists and fact-checkers to work out which sites and stories should be deemed fake news.
Moat calls itself the "Nielsen of digital." It's a service advertisers use to make sure the right people are seeing and clicking on their ads. And those advertisers today have a problem: Because of the automated nature of so much online advertising, cash is increasingly flowing to sites that peddle fake news, often without the knowledge of the advertisers themselves. That's not the kind of news brands want to be seen paying for. But Moat says it's got a fake-news fix that could dry up ad dollars that keep fake news sites in business.

Company executives say Moat's particular window on the internet—tracking billions of ads every day—gives it the kind of data needed to spot fake news stories as they go viral. As it develops its anti-fake news analytics, it's also coordinating with journalists and fact-checkers to put human eyes on flagged stories to develop a consensus on which sites deserve the "fake" label. After they make a decision, cutting off the ad dollars is an easy engineering problem.

'The ad and publishing ecosystem has a responsibility to make it harder for creators of purposely fake news to make money.' Dan Fichter

"The ad and publishing ecosystem has a responsibility to make it harder for creators of purposely fake news to make money," says Dan Fichter, Moat's chief technology officer. Now, Moat is developing a fake news "metric" he says will integrate with automated ad-buying systems online to show the company is taking that responsibility seriously.

Because Moat's tech touches so many ads, Fichter says the company can quickly identify spikes in web traffic. Moat's filter would flag an unknown site suddenly seeing a traffic surge. This visibility across so much of the web is important in the whack-a-mole enterprise of cutting off fake news sites. A fake news writer might publish a story, get caught, and get shut down---then copy the same story to 10 other sites and start the cycle all over again.

The window on fake news would open even wider, Fichter says, if online ad exchanges would join in. Ad exchanges facilitate buying and selling ad inventory from multiple ad networks. They could see whether a particular story is taking off via a sudden jump in demand for ads on the site and cut off funding before ads ever get served—which would suit advertisers just fine.

“Fake news is a relatively new type of brand un-safe environment, or at least one that advertisers are newly conscious of,” says Brian Wieser, a media analyst at Pivotal Research.

News Judgment

After Moat's system flags a potentially fake news story or site, things get more subjective. Moat's plan is to work with journalists, editors, and fact-checkers to come up with a blacklist—a consensus decision about which sites and stories should count as fake news. Moat has discussed its efforts with organizations like Poynter's International Fact-Checking Network, and Fichter says he hopes Moat can convince them and others to formally collaborate. "An entirely automated solution is nowhere on the horizon," says Alexios Mantzarlis, who leads Poynter's fact-checking effort. "You just cannot lose the human element for the moment."

But creating a list is tricky. If a tally of liberal-leaning and conservative-leaning fake news sources showed one side outnumbering the other, critics could—and likely will—call the effort biased. Moat hopes to push back against this likely criticism through transparency: showing that Moat's methodology ensures its tech, paired with the skills of human professionals, will catch, say, fake liberal news even if it's not drawing as much traffic as fake conservative news.