Fig. 1: Advertising companies appearing on misinformation websites by industry.
From: Companies inadvertently fund online misinformation despite consumer backlash
From 2019 to 2021, we recorded the number of times companies in a given industry appeared on the 5,485 websites in our sample per month. Our final sample of advertisers consists of 42,595 companies and 9,539,847 instances of companies advertising on the websites in our sample. We removed industries where the number of advertising appearances by all companies combined was below the 5th percentile of the total number of advertising appearances, resulting in a total of 23 industries. a, The proportion of companies in each industry that appear on misinformation websites at least once in our sample. b, The advertising intensity on misinformation sites relative to non-misinformation websites for each industry. This is calculated by dividing the proportion of advertisements from companies of that industry appearing on misinformation websites among all advertising appearances on misinformation websites with the same proportion for non-misinformation websites per industry. Therefore, values lower than 1 indicate less, values close to 1 represent similar and values higher than 1 represent greater advertising intensity on misinformation sites relative to non-misinformation websites.
