• Priority Area Multidisciplinary Investigations on Disinformation in Europe
• Year 2024
• Country France, United Kingdom
• Project Status Ongoing

ADFUND aims to shed light on the financial mechanisms supporting online disinformation within the EU and the UK, exploring how advertising funds flow towards sources of misinformation. ADFUND will address three main questions:

1. Whether advertisers appearing next to low-credibility content differ significantly from those appearing next to high-credibility content.
2. Whether existing brand safety tools effectively allow advertisers who wish to avoid funding repeat sources of misinformation to do so.
3. Whether ad platforms are successful in preventing known disinformation sources from benefiting from their ad revenue-sharing programs.

The project will leverage innovative methodologies and collaborative efforts, expanding the Who Targets Me data donation browser extension as well as Science Feedback’s Consensus Credibility Scores for classifying content sources’ credibility.

In addition, the project will explore:

• Whether political and social issue ads are adequately labeled on social media platforms,
• Whether data available in ad libraries is consistent with ads seen by real users,
• Whether external observers can reliably estimate the financial flows to given accounts under ad-revenue sharing programmes.

ADFUND is designed to help with the implementation of the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation. It will therefore include a comprehensive report detailing findings and recommendations for adtech providers, regulators, and the research community, aimed at enhancing brand safety measures and reducing funding to repeat disinformation sources.Additionally, a publicly accessible interactive dashboard will be developed for data exploration.

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