CafeMedia partners with The Global Disinformation Index to ensure quality of sites in network

False and misleading news is a pervasive online issue. 

According to The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), brands unknowingly contribute a quarter of a billion dollars each year to disinformation, by spending to show ads on websites that host this type of content.

Brands don’t want to fund disinformation, but it’s incredibly easy to do so unwittingly through programmatic advertising. 

Websites don’t generally publicize “Hey! I peddle ‘adversarial narratives that undermine trust in our social, political, economic, and scientific institutions’” (GDI’s definition of “disinformation”). A website that contains disinformation will often look perfectly acceptable to most automated brand-safety systems that look for keywords related to hate speech or violence.

That’s why a trusted, human vetting process is so critical 

The Global Disinformation Index + CafeMedia

The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) helps advertising companies assess a website’s risk of disinformation and provide a trusted and neutral assessment so brands and ad companies can make informed decisions and avoid funding this content.

We recently became the first ad management service to partner with The Global Disinformation Index to introduce new vetting processes for all sites in the CafeMedia community, so that advertisers can spend confidently and be assured they are NOT funding disinformation!

This allows us to pinpoint potentially harmful topics on the site (for example, disinformation, hate speech, racism, derogatory content, and other topics or themes that are not brand safe) and research the content in a more thorough way than before. 

We’re also using this system to establish new brand safety processes to periodically review our existing partnerships to ensure our community remains as high-quality as possible.

Partnering with GDI helps us support trustworthy sources of information, monetizing businesses that put out useful, factual content, and ensure that we are not funding disinformation. It also protects advertisers’ confidence in the CafeMedia community, providing a safe pool of inventory. And CafeMedia publishers know they are surrounded by vetted peers whose content complements and elevates their own.

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For CafeMedia, brand safety is critical in maintaining the integrity, equity, and high-quality reputation of our community. From the beginning, we have always put quality first, even if it means turning down partnerships with high revenue potential. 

As Google asserts, “Maintaining trust in the ads ecosystem requires setting limits on what we will monetize.”

We’re thrilled to do our part to protect the trust advertisers place in our community, so CafeMedia publishers can continue to make a living doing what they love!