YouTube profits from videos promoting unproven Covid-19 treatments

Media on the incumbent web is in crisis. It turns out that paying publishers for clicks, endless loops of “content” and ads, all served on platforms far beyond their maximum-viable scale is ideal for misinformation, disinformation and the decay of trust.

A study released Sunday by The Global Disinformation Index, a UK nonprofit that rates sites’ trustworthiness, found that 70% of roughly 1,700 disinformation sites it analyzed were getting so-called “programmatic ads” — ads placed automatically — from Google, putting brand names such as Audi and Sprint next to junk content.