Open web publishers have suffered decreased advertising revenue for many years due to automated brand safety tools rendering much of their content unmonetizable. These tools are particularly prone to flagging hard news stories as unsafe and are one of the reasons why so many news sites have turned to subscription models to keep the doors open.
Mark Zuckerberg’s recent overhaul of Meta’s content moderation policies could potentially expose contradictions in the application of brand safety. If brands continue to advertise on Meta platforms — and let’s be honest, its scale will remain irresistible for most — when content moderation has been outsourced to its users, how can they argue that web publications with editorial guidelines and codes of ethics are unsafe?
If advertisers prove by their actions that they are happy to allocate budgets to platforms where misinformation and hate speech can thrive, open web publishers can loudly challenge the notion of brand safety.
An Opportunity For Publishers
The old argument against the open web is that it is a Wild West compared to more carefully policed social platforms. Still, publishers now have the chance to argue that their own sites are, in fact, one of the last places on the internet where strict controls on what the audience sees still exist.
Publishers also have the chance to position their legitimate brand safety credentials to any advertisers who are spooked by Meta’s content policy changes, particularly those targeting audiences most likely to take flight from its platforms, such as LGBTQ+ people who are now allowed to be called mentally ill or referred to as “it” under new platform guidelines, or women who can be referred to as property.
As publishers who serve minority audiences are also among the most likely to be impacted by brand safety blocklists, Meta’s pivot may be a golden opportunity to provide minority-focused brands with a safe haven in an increasingly hostile online ecosystem.
Though I assume that Meta’s platforms are “too big to fail” for advertisers to pull back en masse, Zuckerberg is nonetheless playing with fire by seeking to emulate the free speech absolutism of X. If Meta’s platforms become dominated by extreme political content, it may trigger a user and, consequently, advertiser exodus similar to what X suffered if it strays too far from its roots as a social network.
Much has been made of advertisers returning to X given Elon Musk’s newfound government influence, but even with major brands putting X back on their budgets, allocations are much smaller — 98%, by some estimates. X is as much a political platform for Musk as it is an advertising platform, so it likely serves his aims to keep it running even if its revenues decline. With most of its revenues reliant on advertising, Meta can’t afford to take the same gamble.
The Dangers Of A Two-Tier Information Ecosystem
There is a more chilling implication to the relaxation of content moderation across social media. As mentioned above, many publishers have implemented subscription models to diversify their revenue streams. While some publishers have subscriptions as a supplemental addition to their main content offering, many have opted for a paywall model, where all content is exclusive to paying users.
Social media, on the other hand, is free and will likely remain so. While people browsing the open web are hit with paywall after paywall, those on social media are presented with an infinite scroll of content, algorithmically tuned to maximize their attention. What emerges is a two-tier internet, where those with money can afford access to fact-checked journalism, while everyone else gets whatever filters through social media, condensed into easily digestible bites removed of context and tailored to provoke controversy.
The issues with the ouroboros-like nature of engagement-driven social media feeds have been discussed extensively, but removing content moderation amplifies the issue. Misinformation and disinformation were already problems on social media before Meta’s policy changes, but they will be far worse now that the levee on fake news has broken, with only community notes holding back the flood.
This is why it is more vital than ever that advertising revenues flow into the open web and that publishers are proactive in intelligently collecting and packaging their audience data to make it easily accessible for advertisers. Ad-funded websites are one of the few remaining avenues of freely accessible, credible journalism and a bastion of genuinely free speech in an information ecosystem that increasingly operates at the mercy of a handful of big tech billionaires.
If brand safety is to continue serving its purpose in the coming years, the industry must reassess its impacts and focus on fraud prevention rather than controlling what speech is and is not monetizable. Given the proliferation of generative AI, access to reliable information is more important than ever, and advertisers must support journalism — not just subscribers — if we want to maintain any sense of consensus reality. If we make the truth unsafe for brands, we make the world unsafe for all of us.
