In the new study, published in JAMA Network Open, researchers scrutinized advertising revenue from 11 news sites flagged for spreading health misinformation, including false claims about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
About 10% of the more than $336 million that the sites made from advertising from 2021 to 2024 came from health groups, including government agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); drug makers such Pfizer and Eli Lilly; and nonprofits such as the American Heart Association (AHA) and Alzheimer’s Association.
News websites with a history of spreading health misinformation, including NewsMax and ZeroHedge, “are directly at odds with the missions of these organizations,” said Neeraj Patel, a fourth-year medical student at the Yale School of Medicine and first author of the new paper.
The misinformation industry earns $2.6 billion a year in estimated advertising revenue, according to a 2021 report from NewsGuard, which deploys trained journalists to track online misinformation …. For every $2.16 in digital ad revenue sent to legitimate newspapers, US advertisers send $1 to misinformation websites, according to the report.
