NewsGuard partners with Semasio to protect brands from ad placements on misinformation

News in brief

Digital news credibility ratings provider NewsGuard is partnering with unified contextual ad targeting company Semasio with the goal of helping to protect brands from ad placements on misinformation and making it easier for brands to direct ad spend toward credible news sites.

Through the partnership, brands will be able to activate a set of contextual segments curated based on data from NewsGuard’s team of journalists, who assess the credibility of news and information sources using “nine basic, apolitical journalistic criteria, flagging publishers that fail to meet basic journalistic standards”.

Two such publishers that were recently flagged as untrustworthy by NewsGuard include FoxNews.com and MSNBC.com, which critics from both ends of the political spectrum have called controversial.

Brands using Semasio will now be able to enable pre-bid suppression ad placements on sites NewsGuard has flagged for publishing anti-vaccine information misinformation, election integrity hoaxes, Russia-Ukraine war disinformation, and other similar categories of false or unreliable news.

Comscore and NewsGuard estimate that $2.6bn is (typically inadvertently) spent placing ads on misinformation and disinformation websites each year.

The NewsGuard segments are expected to launch within the Semasio platform in Q3 of this year.