TrustList: Defunding disinformation profiteers and boosting sustainable journalism

A recent report from the US Association of National Advertisers argues that up to $13bn, 15% of the $88bn global programmatic market, is being sucked out of the media ecosystem by Made for Advertising profiteers every year, stealing attention from readers and money from advertisers on destinations that often promote misinformation, disinformation or clickbait. This includes sites that push election misinformation, false health claims, political propaganda, anti-vaccine narratives, hate speech and other types of disinformation. Not only does this damage democracies, it also robs authentic, trustworthy news sites of revenue.

In most cases, advertisers don’t know they are funding disinformation, because they can’t differentiate the fake news sites from the millions of legitimate sites. The fake news market relies on a complex, decentralised network that involves major tech companies, ad tech companies, PR and marketing firms, and social media influencers. The market is sustained by ad placement, which is connected to traffic, and facilitated by intermediaries. This is where TrustList comes in.

TrustList is a platform that aims to address these issues by promoting responsible advertising practices. It helps media buyers and advertisers cut off revenue streams for clickbait creators and disinformation spreaders, thereby promoting trust in journalism and putting a stop to the spread of misleading information.

Funded by Google News Initiative, which supports projects that fight mis/disinformation and increase trust in journalism, TrustList is a collaboration between Code for Africa (CfA), Africa’s largest network of digital democracy labs, and Dy/Dx, a digital transformation practice. Developed in collaboration with CfA’s CivicSignal machine learning team and designed in partnership with Dy/Dx, TrustList is a data-as-a-service platform.

TrustList's assessments rely on cutting edge integration with Large Language Models, aggregated data from consortium partners, impression-level log analysis of bought media, and daily random sampling of trending content by human analysts. These analysts use methodologies inspired by the Global Disinformation Index, NewsGuard and other organisations to rank articles and publishers. The watchlists, broken down into red, grey and green lists, are made available to advertising partners as APIs and/or plug-in widgets for easy integration with supply side platforms (SSPs) and other programmatic advertising management systems. TrustList's widgets send out alerts whenever a media buyer tries to include a proscribed domain in an advertising campaign. These alerts provide synchronous advice on reputational risk and brand safety, tapping into advertisers' growing concerns about placing their brands next to harmful content. As well as a raft of functional and transparent methodologies, TrustList offers advertisers a high degree of brand safety to ensure 'red-listed' or 'grey-listed' online media sources are not inadvertently funded.

Red-listed media are defined as consistently spreading disinformation or misinformation, whereas grey-listed media are publishers that might unintentionally boost disinformation because of weak editorial systems and publishing systems. Additionally, TrustList offers a 'safe list' of trusted and credible media sources, including grassroots media that may be otherwise overlooked by advertisers, as well as contextual markers to provide insight into what content the advertiser is appearing alongside.

The South African National Editors' Forum (SANEF) and South Africa's Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB-SA) have committed to using TrustList as an industry framework for open and transparent ratings of member media, fostering a self-reinforcing system that encourages responsible advertising practices. Major advertisers have also pledged to request media buyers to use TrustList to shape their advertising portfolios.

TrustList is taking a proactive approach to fighting disinformation and promoting trust in journalism. By guiding media buyers and advertisers towards responsible advertising, TrustList helps curb the spread of misinformation and supports the growth of credible, trustworthy media sources. The platform's ground-breaking approach to using impression level data from advertisers to audit and rank domains is setting new standards in the advertising industry, making TrustList an invaluable tool for anyone who values accurate and trustworthy information in the digital age.

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