posted May 02, 2024 10:58 PM            

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All of these things are true, at least according to the Gateway Pundit: Election officials lost or tampered with millions of Trump votes on election night last November. In Pennsylvania, an impossible number of mail-in ballots flowed into the state, leading to Joe Biden’s victory there. (That story’s headline blared with all the subtlety of a fire alarm: “SHOCKING EXCLUSIVE: WE CAUGHT THEM!”) Months later, Attorney General Bill Barr failed to follow up on legitimate claims of election fraud.

In reality, none of this is true. The Gateway Pundit, a far right news website which wouldn’t comment for this story, pushes a daily deluge of false, misleading or fake stories to a conservative audience eager to believe them—with much of the misinformation focused on the election, Covid-19 and the vaccine rollout, according to a new analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate. It’s been lucrative for Gateway Pundit: From November 2020 to June, the site brought in $1.1 million through Google Ad Sense, the search engine’s shared advertising revenue program, according to the center’s study, even though Google’s rules would seem to prohibit content like Gateway Pundit’s from being monetized. (A Gateway Pundit lawyer dismissed the Center for Counter Digital Hate’s work, saying, “all of the allegations and facts and numbers to which you have cited are.”)

A Google spokesperson says the company has already demonetized Gateway Pundit’s homepage and some of its stories, including a half dozen or so examples of Gateway Pundit pieces that the Center for Countering Digital Hate cited and were shared with Google. The spokesperson continued: “We have strict publisher policies that prohibit content promoting anti-vaccine theories, COVID-19 misinformation, and false claims about the 2020 U.S. Presidential election – and our enforcement can be as targeted as demonetizing a specific page. We already actioned the majority of pages shared from this report back in 2020 or early 2021 and similarly stopped serving ads on the site’s homepage last year. We will continue to take appropriate action if new content is uploaded that violates our policies.”

The internet is rife with misinformation, and much of the recent focus about it has centered on how it spreads on social media like Facebook, especially in the wake of President Biden’s stark comments two weeks ago that Facebook is “killing people” by not better guarding against such content. But the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s research into Gateway Pundit is a useful reminder that misinformation is not only a Facebook problem. Every major company on the web must contend with it in some way, and Google is certainly no exception.

“There's an entire business model built off the back of Google ads with misinformation attached to clickbait headlines,” says the center’s CEO, Imran Ahmed. “The Gateway Pundit is a habitual offender.”

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