As native ads mislead readers, experts identify key interventions

According to academics from Boston University in the US and Cambridge University in the UK, fossil fuel companies are among the biggest native advertisers – spending tens of millions of dollars to shape public perceptions of the climate crisis.

“Because these ads appear on reputable, trusted news platforms, and are formatted like reported pieces, they often come across to readers as genuine journalism,” says the study’s lead author Michelle Amazeen, an Associate Professor of Mass Communication at Boston. “Research has shown native ads are really effective at swaying readers’ opinions.”

This study is claimed to be the first to investigate how two mitigation strategies – disclosures and inoculations – may reduce climate misperceptions caused by exposure to native advertising from the fossil fuel industry.

The authors found that when participants were shown a real native ad from oil and gas giant ExxonMobil, disclosure messages helped them recognise advertising, while inoculations helped reduce their susceptibility to misleading claims.

“As fossil fuel companies invest in disguising their advertisements, this study furthers our understanding of how to help readers recognise when commercial content is masquerading as news and spreading climate misperceptions,” adds study co-author Professor Benjamin Sovacool, also of Boston.

The research builds on other work by Amazeen and her colleagues at the College of Communication, assessing how people recognise and respond to covert misinformation campaigns. By better understanding these processes, they hope that they can prevent misinformation before it takes root on important issues.

ExxonMobil advertisement

In 2018, readers of The New York Times website encountered what appeared to be an article titled ‘The Future of Energy’, describing efforts by ExxonMobil to invest in algae-based biofuels. But many readers may have missed the small banner at the top of the page mentioning that it was an ad sponsored by ExxonMobil.

The researchers say the ad neglected to mention the company’s large carbon footprint. It also omitted key context – such as that the stated goal for algae-based biofuel production would represent only 0.2% of the company’s overall refinery capacity.

The research team examined how more than a thousand participants responded to ‘The Future of Energy’ ad in a simulated social media feed. Before viewing the ad, participants saw one, both, or neither of the following intervention messages:

• An inoculation message designed to psychologically ‘inoculate’ readers from future influence by broadly warning them of potential exposures to misleading paid content. In this study, the inoculation message was a fictitious social media post from United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reminding people to be wary of online misinformation.

• A disclosure message with a simple line of text appearing on a post. In this study, the text ‘Paid Post by ExxonMobil’ accompanied the piece. Studies have shown that often, when native ads are shared on social media, this disclosure disappears.

“Each of these two approaches can be beneficial in its own way, and each has shortcomings,” notes study co-author Arunima Krishna, an Associate Professor of Mass Communication, Advertising and Public Relations.

“With this study, we got a clearer understanding of how each message type can work to counteract climate disinformation. We also studied how the two interventions can work together.”

Some of the key findings include:

• The presence of a disclosure more than doubled the likelihood that a participant recognised the content as an ad. However, the participants who had seen a disclosure, as well as those who had not, were equally likely to agree with the statement: “companies like ExxonMobil are investing heavily in becoming more environmentally friendly”.

• Inoculation messages were much more effective than disclosures at protecting people’s existing beliefs on climate change, decreasing the likelihood that participants would agree with misleading claims presented in the ad.

“Disclosures helped people [to] recognise advertising. However, they didn’t help them recognise that the material was biased and misleading,” Amazeen explains.

“Inoculation messaging provides general education that can be used to fill in that gap and help people resist [native advertising’s] persuasive effects. Increasing general awareness about misinformation strategies used by self-interested actors, combined with clearer labels on sponsored content, will help people distinguish native ads from reported content.”

You can find out more about the study here.