Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor Emeritus of Education at Stanford University. This essay is based on his latest book, with co-author Mike Caulfield, Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online (University of Chicago Press, 2023). Here, he highlights the ways that corporations deceive students with advertising that looks like news.
Our Kids Are Being Sold to and They Don’t Know It–
And Neither Do We
A recent California bill mandating the teaching of media literacy cites a Stanford University study showing that “82 percent of middle school pupils struggled to distinguish advertisements from news stories.” Along with my Stanford colleagues, I was the author of that study.
Between 2015-2016 our research team collected nearly 8,000 student responses. In one exercise, we asked middle school students to examine the home page of Slate, the online news magazine. The site was organized as a series of tiles, each with a headline, the name of the author, and an illustration. However, some tiles were author-less, such as “The Real Reasons Women Don’t Go into Tech,” which was accompanied by the words sponsored content. This label notwithstanding, the vast majority of middle schoolers believed that “The Real Reasons Women Don’t Go into Tech” was news.
If only the solution to students’ confusion were as simple as teaching what “sponsored content” means. In the past few years, a dizzying array of terms—“in association with,” “partner content,” “presented by,” “crafted with,” “hosted by,” “brought to you by,” or, simply—and enigmatically—“with”—have been concocted to satisfy the Federal Trade Commission requirement that ads be labeled. As we describe in our new book, Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Choices What to Believe Online, it’s not only middle school students who are getting hoodwinked by this farrago of terms. We all are.
Researchers at Boston University and the University of Georgia surveyed people across age levels and backgrounds after they had read a 515-word article, “America’s Smartphone Obsession Extends to Online Banking.” The article came with a label saying that it was created for the Bank of America. But the disclosure was overshadowed by the masthead of The New York Times and the article’s headline. Only one in ten respondents identified the article as an ad. The marketing firm Contently found similar results: 80% of respondents mistook an ad in the Wall Street Journal for a news article. The study’s author, an advertising insider with reasons to downplay the obvious, admitted: “There’s little doubt that consumers are confused by native ads.”
Native ads, so-called because they’re designed to fade into the surrounding “native” content, use the same fonts, color schemes, and style as regular news stories. An article may look like news, written by an independent and trustworthy journalist, but in reality, it’s tainted by the agenda of the company that paid for it. You think you’re being informed only to find out—if you do find out—that you’re being swindled. In 2018 native advertising raked in $32.9 billion, eclipsing all other forms of digital advertising and growing at astronomical rates.
At first, it was only scrappy upstarts like BuzzFeed (masters of clickbaity stories like “Ten Important Life Lessons You Can Learn from Cats”) that pioneered this new form of advertising. But as ad income plummeted in places like The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC, they, too, got in on the game. Initially, the price didn’t seem too steep: sacrifice a modicum of integrity to stay afloat. But the slope downward was slippery. If the long-standing commitment of journalism was to erect a wall of separation between the news side and the business, native advertising dissolved the mortar in the wall. The resulting seepage blurred the boundaries beyond recognition. Publishers tried to convince themselves they weren’t doing anything wrong. But in their heart of hearts, they knew they were engaging in journalistic hanky-panky. “When I explain what I do to friends outside the publishing industry,” wrote one publishing insider, “the first response is always ‘so you are basically tricking users into clicking on ads.’ ”
In 2019, after a stream of headlines bemoaning the confusion caused by misinformation, we undertook a second study. This time our sample matched the demographic make-up of high school students across the country. Over 3,000 students with access to a live internet connection participated. One exercise asked them to evaluate items appearing on the website of The Atlantic. The first, entitled “Why Solving Climate Change Will Be Like Mobilizing for War,” was written by Venkatesh Rao; the second, “The Great Transition,” featured an infographic about energy usage along with the statement, “saving the world from climate change is all about altering the energy mix.” The logo of The Atlantic appeared in the upper left corner next to a hyperlink with the words “Sponsor Content What’s this?”, next a small yellow shell. Two-thirds of high school students failed to identify the infographic as an ad from Shell Oil.
Why should we be concerned? To start, if students are to become informed citizens, they need to understand that multi-national companies are not in the business of helping humanity or adopting stray animals. Their goal is to please shareholders by increasing profits. Fossil fuel companies, especially, may want us to think they’re on the right side of history when it comes to climate change. But actions speak louder than ads. Clean energy investments by big oil companies (“renewable resources” as the Shell ad calls them) represent a mere sliver, one percent, of their yearly capital expenditures, a pittance compared to what they spend exploring and discovering new ways to dredge fossil fuels from the earth and sea. Shell might not be outright lying in its infographic but we can be sure of one thing: they’re not going to pay for something that casts them in a negative light. The whole point of native advertising is to burnish a company’s image. Instead of having us view Shell as the enemy of climate change, its ads are designed to soften us up, to plant a seed of doubt. “OK, they may be an oil company,” we’re supposed to think, “but maybe—just maybe—they’re really trying.”
We can sum up why we should teach students to be skeptical of Shell’s infographic in three words: conflict of interest. It goes against the company’s interest to be forthright about the harmful effects of fossil fuels. Big oil, writes Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes and author of Why Trust Science, “may be a reliable source of information on oil and gas extraction,” but they are “unlikely to be a reliable source of information on climate change.” Why? For one simple reason: “The former is its business and the latter threatens it.”
It’s not just big oil who’ve gotten in on the native ad game. With China and Russia leading the pack, foreign governments spend millions of dollars to place “news” stories in leading digital publications like the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune. In the twelve months from November 2019 to October 2020, the China Daily Distribution Corporation funneled over nine million dollars to influence American audiences. A favored venue was MSN, Microsoft’s web portal, which featured an upbeat story about how Tibet, the nation ravaged by China in a brutal 1950 takeover, had “broken free from the fetters of invading imperialism and embarked on a bright road of unity, progress and development.” Nowhere does the article say the story was paid. You only discern this if you recognize “Xinhua” as China’s state-run news agency.
Whether paid for by a multi-national corporation or a foreign government, the goal of native advertising is the same: to persuade us when our guard is down. Sponsors know that if their message were plastered with the word “ad” in big red letters, we’d ignore it. At the same time, it’s important to understand that just because something’s an ad doesn’t necessarily mean it’s false. Big companies are wary of ads backfiring. They fear the consequences of being outed as liars. Persuasion can assume many forms in addition to outright lying. An ad can tell only part of the story. It can leave out the broader context. It can ignore evidence that goes against the story a company or foreign nation wants to tell. It can emphasize some facts and de-emphasize others. It can use examples that tug at our heartstrings, even when those examples misrepresent general trends. In fact, a partial truth is often more dangerous and harder to detect than a pack of lies.
The internet is one giant marketing experiment and today’s students are the guinea pigs. Richly compensated PhDs work diligently figuring out how to deceive them without their noticing. This deception is not an aberration or bug in the system—it’s how the game is played. Our students are part of a treacherous game. If we don’t teach them how it’s played, who will?
Certainly not Shell Oil.
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Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor Emeritus of Education at Stanford University. This essay is based on his latest book, with co-author Mike Caulfield, Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online (University of Chicago Press, 2023)
If we really want students (and all citizens) to have media literacy we would help them understand that the vast majority of stories in mainstream media are little more than press releases from the U.S. government laundered to look like news articles. They can be discovered by noting that the only sources are anonymous government officials saying, in essence, “Trust me, bro.” But this blog isn’t ready for that conversation.
Yes, the way to achieve media literacy is to decide with Donald Trump that all standard news articles are “fake news” and that the only sources of truth are
Tsar Vladimir Putin the Defenestrater
Spokespersons for Vladimir Putin the Defenestrater, state-controlled Russian media, and Communist propagandists posing as journalists
Thanks for sharing that wisdom with us, Dienne. Deciding that Putin is always right and that everything else is fake news makes it all SOOOO easy. One doesn’t every have to think at all, in fact!
Sorry, that was an unfair comparison. Donald Trump doesn’t actually believe that everything is fake news except for what Tsar Vladimir tells us. It takes a special sort of Red Queen mind to do that.
Dienne,
Believe no one except Putin and Russian government press releases.
Putin, btw, who has been actively working toward this end for a long time now via his agents and assets in the United States and his misinformation campaigns via our social media, is now speaking openly of how wonderful it would be to see another Civil War in the United States.
One of my favorite sports is looking through old local newspapers, usually on microfilm, for advertisements. Around the 1880s, these ads proliferated, selling everything from agricultural equipment to home remedies. I noticed that those old ads often bore a remarkable similarity to the news stories.
Many of the stories were of adventures and natural history, quite fantastic in nature and obviously bordering on fiction. Meanwhile, the ads sounded scientific, and were perhaps difficult for a nineteenth century audience to distinguish from real medical science. Medical science in those days could indeed be thin in its logic.
For years, I thought I was encountering an age when writers really only knew how to write one way, and readers only understood one sort of exposition. Now I wonder if there was not a direct agenda to confuse truth with fiction. There are a lot of aspects of modern society that remind me of the last part of the 1800s.
Wondering, Roy, whether you have read Titan, the biography of John D. Rockefeller by Ron Chernow. Rockefeller’s grandfather was one of those Professor Marvel travelling medicine show guys in the South and Midwest in the 19th century. He had wives all over the place and would scoot in, gather a crowd, sell some cure-alls (cancer? toothache? crooked spine? This will fix you right up), and scoot out of town again just ahead of the law.
You know, sort of like Don the Con today.
Or like chiropractors. I had one of those quacks tell me that he could cure my swimmer’s ear (I was an avid swimmer) by adjusting my spine. ROFL.
One step above or below Rolfing. Not sure which.
It’s sad that there are so many of these quack pseudosciences in the medical world STILL. I have a friend who is convinced that he has been cured numerous times by craniosacral therapy, another who paid tens of thousands of dollars for “no touch energy healing” by Marconics practitioners who “opened her chakras” so that she could receive the “light energy” from the “invisible mother ship” circling the Earth and helping to create “light workers.”
I wish I were making this stuff up.
I have not read that biography. I meant to add that I have noticed Facebook posts that are like the nineteenth century ads, purporting to be informational when they are actually a polemic for an idea or a sales pitch for a product. Back to the future.
Patent medicines were a bit easier in the 1800s, when people believed that things that changed your senses in a defined way (whiskey, camphor, etc) were actually medicinal in nature. Colas that have the name of Dr, Dr Pepper being the most famous, were marketed initially as tonics to various maladies because they affected the senses. Most of these were laced with caffeine in huge amounts. Think Monster.
I so appreciate your learning, Roy. And thank you for sharing it with us here.
Speak softly about the mother ship. I hope mine will come in one day.
It’s a mother of a ship, that mother ship! According to the founder of Marconics: the Human Upgrade, she was transported to it and met the captain, who was a long-haired hunk (think Fabio) who told her who she really was, Grace-Elohim, the being who created the original plan for life on Earth and architect of DNA. Also on the mother ship were various ancient Egyptian and other gods, and they were enlisting her to go back to earth and charge people hundreds of dollars a pop for energy healing sessions so they could unlock their chakras and download the energy from the mother ship necessary for their transformation into multi-dimensional beings who could do battle with the evil invisible reptilians attempting to take control of the blue crystals of power buried deep in the Earth. Oh, and all the light workers get angel or god names corresponding to their true identities in previous lifetimes. Oh, and all this is guided by signs like the appearance of 3:33 or 4:44 or 1:11 on clock dials.
What passes for a religion in America (and Japan, it’s big there, too) today.
I find all that even less plausible than, “I had myself born to a virgin as the son of myself so that I myself could be punished for what I had decided were the sins of the people in order to save them from myself because otherwise I had to punish them myself because somebody had to be punished, right, because I, myself, had decided that that was necessary.” Which is more than a little bizarro, IMHO.
I wish I were making up all that Marconics stuff. But no. It’s a new age cult religion and about as looney as it gets, a kind of amalgam of looney tunes ideas from other space cults and New Age fantasies like shape-shifting reptilians among us, “energy healing.” “Angel numbers,” and lots of other utterly batshit notions.
It’s not an assembly bill any more; teaching media literacy across subjects is California law as of 2024. That’s a good thing, although it would be much better to make laws regulating native advertising than laws requiring citizens to be weary of native advertising. I have taught and will teach media literacy, although I prefer to teach Robert Frost. Gotta do what I gotta do in the 21st century. It will be interesting to be instructed to teach media literacy by administrators and colleagues who believe wholesale the false advertising of the standardized testing and online test prep industries.
People are dupes, mostly, seems to me. Now there’s research backing that up. A third of us still think the presidential election was fraudulent. There’s nothing wrong with making laws against tricking people, since so many of us are so easily fooled. There are laws against tricking people in the books of Torah, and those are some pretty darn time-tested, old books. If the tobacco industry can be made to label packages with large font, all caps surgeon general’s warnings, “SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Tobacco Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide,” the ad industry can be made to label sponsored content with large font, all caps FTC warnings: FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION’S WARNING: This Advertising Content Contains Rubbish.
Lol. I heart this post. Especially this:
It will be interesting to be instructed to teach media literacy by administrators and colleagues who believe wholesale the false advertising of the standardized testing and online test prep industries.
And this:
There are laws against tricking people in the books of Torah, and those are some pretty darn time-tested, old books.
Your post reminded me of Frost’s lovely little poem, “A Considerable Speck,” about a bug on the paper he was reading or writing on (I forget which). He says that he is always pleased to encounter evidence of mind on a page. I always feel that way reading your posts, LCT.