Advertising: whether on- or offline, it’s everywhere. However, twenty-first advertisers no longer just operate out of Madison Avenue boardrooms. Today's "mad men" are part of the adtech industry, the complex network of advertisers, platforms, and publishers that operates just below the Internet's surface. In online auction houses known as ad exchanges, the biggest companies in the world bid on a valuable commodity- our attention.

Like the adtech industry, online disinformation is big business. In 2020, websites promoting COVID-19 conspiracy theories and disinformation raked in over 25 million dollars in ad revenue in just five months. They hosted ads from some of the world’s biggest brands and organizations, including Pepsi, Comcast, and even the CDC. So how could something like this happen? In this interview with CARP's Deirdre Jane Prigge, digital media scholar Dr. Josh Braun explains how “normal accidents” rooted in the design of the digital world allow bad actors to profit off fake news, spread junk information, and even destroy local journalism.

Show Notes

Joshua Braun is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst whose work examines sociological questions surrounding online media distribution. Josh's papers have appeared have appeared in Communication Theory, Communication, Culture & Critique, Journalism, Digital Journalism, and Journalism Practice. His book on the digital distribution of TV news, “This program is brought to you by… : Distributing television news online" was published in 2015 by Yale University Press. Josh is also co-editor of ⁠Distribution Matters⁠, a series of books on media distribution from The MIT Press. In recent years, Josh has begun a second line of research into the ways problems with the digital advertising ecosystem affect the health of news media. He is currently working on a new book for MIT Press about the civic impacts of media distribution. For updates on Josh's work, check out his website.

Josh received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Communication from Cornell University. He also holds a master's in Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania and an individual-concentration bachelor's degree in "Sciences in the Media" from the University of California Santa Barbara Josh is an affiliated fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, a former graduate fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, and a founding member of the "Culture Digitally" NSF working group.

Fake News, Real Money: How the Adtech Industry Monetizes Misinformation (with Dr. Joshua Braun)

CARP Radio By Character Assassination and Reputation Politics LabMar 21, 2023