Global Disinformation Index report examining 49 sites with COVID-19 disinformation says Google placed ads on 84% of them
One ad for telecom company O2 appeared on an article linking virus to 5G networks — Google has taken aggressive action to scrub coronavirus conspiracies … Tweets: @rj_gallagher Tweets: Ryan Gallagher / @rj_gallagher : Google has been removing some Covid-19 conspiracy theories from its platforms, but at the same time it is also placing ads on websites that publish the theories, helping them generate revenue & continue their operations: https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Global Disinformation Index has been building this case for months: its 2019 work found adtech spending roughly $235M a year on fact-checked misinformation sites per its earlier industry-wide study, and weeks after this report it projected COVID-19 misinfo sites alone would draw at least $25M this year from Google, Amazon and other ad platforms in its follow-up estimate. This piece sharpens the focus onto Google specifically — ads on 84% of 49 COVID-19 disinformation sites, including an O2 telecom ad next to an article linking the virus to 5G networks.
First-order effects
- Google's enforcement teams are simultaneously removing COVID conspiracies from its own platforms while its ad network funds them elsewhere, leaving brands like O2 exposed next to virus-5G claims they never chose.
- The named publishers keep operating: programmatic revenue from Google's network is what sustains these 49 sites despite Google's stated content policies.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers and agencies face mounting brand-safety pressure to audit where automated placement actually lands, pushing demand toward exclusion lists and direct deals over open exchanges.
- Google's defense that specific sites 'don't violate its policy' invites researchers to keep publishing site-level evidence — the pattern already extended to AdSense/DoubleClick health misinfo within days of the Fast Company findings and later to election and climate disinfo across three continents in ProPublica's funneling analysis.
Third-order effects
- If programmatic ad networks cannot reliably control adjacency at scale, the structural fix shifts toward regulation of adtech transparency and mandatory disclosure of which sites monetize platform ads.
- Disinformation economics become the accountability frame: as long as ad platforms fund fringe publishers, content moderation on one surface merely displaces — not defunds — the underlying operations.
The trend: Platform moderation is colliding with programmatic advertising economics, as researchers like the Global Disinformation Index turn ad-placement data into evidence that ad networks fund the very content their owners ban.