ArgumentHow Amazon, Geico and Walmart Fund Propaganda
Lenin is sometimes said to have predicted that capitalists would sell Russia the rope with which they would be hanged. L. Gordon Crovitz writes that “Yet not even Lenin could have imagined Vladimir Putin’s success in getting some of the largest Western companies to subsidize his disinformation efforts by advertising on his government-run ‘news’ websites.”
Lenin is sometimes said to have predicted that capitalists would sell Russia the rope with which they would be hanged. L. Gordon Crovitz writes in the New Yok Times that “Yet not even Lenin could have imagined Vladimir Putin’s success in getting some of the largest Western companies to subsidize his disinformation efforts by advertising on his government-run ‘news’ websites.”
Crovitz, a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal and a co-founder and co-chief executive officer of NewsGuard, which rates news publishers based on their reliability. notes that American companies such as Geico, Amazon, PayPal, Walmart, and Kroger, among others, place their ads in RT and Sputnik, the Russian government’s two leading disinformation and propaganda vehicles. He writes:
These all-American brands don’t intend to subsidize the Kremlin. The problem is that with programmatic advertising brands can target the kinds of audiences they want to reach online, rather than specifying, as they once did, on which websites their ads should appear. As a result, these ads inadvertently end up on all kinds of inappropriate sites.
It’s hard to estimate the revenue the Russian disinformation sites earn from these programmatic ads.
Whatever the amount, companies are supporting websites that are the very definition of corporate social irresponsibility. RT describes its role as encouraging people in other countries to “question more” — that is, promoting divisiveness in the United States and Europe. It publishes falsehoods such as denying that the Russia-backed regime in Syria used nerve gas on its own people.
A new theme on RT is that the emerging wireless 5G technology causes cancer. RT also reports that 5G cell towers cause learning disabilities and nose bleeds in children. No research establishes these risks… Despite this scaremongering, telecommunications companies that depend on the success of 5G have advertised on RT, including T-Mobile, CenturyLink, Comcast and Vonage. Cisco has advertised on RT, even though it is investing heavily in 5G technology.
Crovitz calls on companies to limit their programmatic ads to trustworthy news sites. “If this approach catches on, Mr. Putin will just have to spend more of his government’s own money to promote its disinformation,” he concludes.
