Alex Goldman

And the answer, which completely shocked me, is that generally speaking, they don't know they're there.

Now, I genuinely did not know any of this, but when it comes to online advertising, the way the system is set up actually makes it very difficult for advertisers to know where their ads are appearing.

And this issue has been called the financial engine of not just this particular fake obituary scam, but of fake news, health hoaxes, and AI slop all across the internet.

So we're gonna spend some time talking about this online ad system.

We're going to talk about how it works and how it came to be.

And the person that's going to help us do that is professor of journalism at UMass Amherst, Joshua Braun.

But there was a problem with this system.

Advertisers never knew how many of their customers were actually seeing these ads.

So there was always this sense that they were wasting some amount of money.

They just didn't know how much.

And that's where the internet stepped in, with a promise to solve the waste issue using personal data to drive targeted ads.

So thanks to this new technology, advertisers could put their ads in front of their customers no matter where they are on the Internet.

And at the end of the month, Google, or whoever they purchased their ads through, would come back with a report showing exactly how many of their customers actually saw the ad.

For advertisers, it seemed like a perfect system, a seller's utopia.

And then the cracks started to show.

The first major reckoning happened after the 2016 election, when more than 100 companies, including Kellogg's and Procter & Gamble, discovered that their ads had been running on sites peddling political disinformation, radical extremism, and hate speech.

Which, again, means they had been funding that stuff.

And maybe you think they didn't actually just discover this.

Like, maybe you think that's just what they said to save face when their customers discovered it and got pissed off.

And honestly, I probably would have thought that too.