Fake News and Advertising Firms
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-fake-news-ad-economy-20161208-story.html
It is increasingly easy to generate revenue by simply attracting people to your website via ads. This revenue comes from having ad space on your own page which is auctioned off through a platform such as google to make the ads targeted towards the specific user. While this is useful for content creators, it also means that there are many people misusing this system to spread fake news in order to draw an audience to their site. By having a catchy and shocking title, even if it is conveying false information, people are likely to click on your ad to read more about it, giving your website more traffic and therefore more money. While advertising platforms are able to filter out sensitive content, they are not able to filter out inaccurate content.
In this class and as we see in this example, those advertisers who are willing to pay more are getting spots that generate even more revenue for themselves, and therefore are growing and making more money from their own advertisements all while spreading fake news. They are able to use these algorithms that are meant to auction out adds to the highest bidders to their advantage, and generate traffic to their websites with false information.