NEW YORK — Wittingly or not, major global corporations are helping fund sites that traffic in fake news by putting ads on them.
Take, for instance, a story that falsely claimed former President Barack Obama had banned Christmas cards to overseas military personnel. Despite debunking by The Associated Press and other fact-checking outlets, that article lives on at “Fox News The FB Page,” which has no connection to the news channel although its bears a replica of its logo.
Such automated ads are a major income source for fake news stories, which may have influenced voters in the presidential election. A widely shared but untrue story that pegged a Washington, D.C., pizzeria as part of a Hillary Clinton-run child sex trafficking ring led a man to fire a gun in the restaurant.
When the AP pointed out that a Chrysler Ram truck ad popped up on a story saying that the United Nations was making the U.S. pay reparations to African-Americans — it’s not — Fiat Chrysler said it works with ad companies to scour individual sites and block them from loading its ads if it finds them “harmful.”
An ad for would-be Amazon rival Jet.com, owned by Walmart, showed up on a story saying California Democrats legalized child prostitution.
Walgreens ads also popped up next to the child prostitution story on the site The Red Elephants, but the drugstore chain has since prevented its ads from appearing there, a company spokesman said.
A person who responded to an email sent to The Red Elephants declined to discuss the site’s advertising, but insisted that the child-prostitution story was true. The person declined to provide their name.