Fauxbituaries (Hyperfixed)

We’re taking a breather to let Grant out of his cage and get some fresh air, but we didn’t want to leave you without something to panic about. So this week we’ve got an episode from friend of the show and previous guest, Alex Goldman, the host of Hyperfixed. It’s about Markus. When his good friend died suddenly, he went online to get more information. What he found was several AI-written obituaries on dodgy looking websites with a litany of factual inaccuracies. Who is making these, and why? And is there anything that can be done to stop them? We think you’ll dig it. If you do, you can find all of Hyperfixed’s episodes at https://www.hyperfixedpod.com/ or wherever you listen to podcasts. Panic World will be back with something special for you on Friday. In the meantime, take it away, Hyperfixed! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi, hello, it's Wednesday. You're used to my voice, at least a little bit, on today. We're taking a little bit of a breather, but we have something from friend of the show, Alex Goldman. His newish podcast, Hyperfixed, it's good. So it's here in the feed instead of us who are resting, but because we love you and appreciate you. And I can't make my voice sound sincere, but I do mean that. We're gonna have a little something extra for you on Friday. All right, Hyperfixed, go.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, and this is Hyperfixed. Each week on our show, listeners write in with their problems, big and small, and I solve them. Or at least I try. And if I don't, I at least give a good reason why I can't. This week, phobituaries.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  I'm not sure how big this problem is. It could be, on one end of the spectrum, just a lazy, little, nothing problem. On the other, we pull the thread and go down the rabbit hole, Alex. It could potentially lead into some sort of crazy syndicate bot farm thing.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  This is Marcus. He's 35 years old. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia. And despite this adorably conspiratorial pitch he just made to me, Marcus is actually a very normal guy. He works in sustainability reporting. He just became a father. And he's married to a wonderful woman, who he literally calls...

• 1:24Speaker 02

  My wonderful wife.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  So how did the normal guy with the wonderful wife come to be talking about rabbit holes and syndicates? Well, it's actually a pretty sad story. And it started about two months ago.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  On February 16th, Marcus and his wife got a call. That kind of call that people in their 30s never expect to get. One of their very best friends had suddenly died. And the news had left them reeling.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Not just because this friend was only 32 years old, but she was the kind of 32-year-old that seemed utterly unstoppable.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  If she was a video game character, she was maxed out. She broke the game because she had so many more skill points than the average person. Her wit so sharp. She was an ultra marathon runner. She would backcountry ski. She just excelled in every facet of what she did. And she did so many cool things. She honestly was just such an amazing life force. We were very lucky to have her as the emcee at our wedding. And yeah, I mean, she was just...

• 2:33Speaker 02

  He was awesome, Alex.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  It seemed impossible that this awesome, amazing life force could so suddenly be snuffed out. And yet, it was true. So when they got the call that their friend had died, the first thing Marcus and his wife wanted to know was, "How in the world did this happen?" The person who called them hadn't told them the details. And although they knew her family, they didn't want to burden them with questions at such a tragic time.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  So we ended up doing some Googling, almost, I wouldn't say hourly, about information on our friend's passing, if there were news reports, if there was an obituary.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  At first, there was nothing, just a total information vacuum. But within a day or two, notices about his friend's death did start popping up on the internet.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  At the top of Google search results, Marcus found links to these random, small-time news sites, sites with names like MemoirNews360 and NYCBreaking.Site. And I mean, already, one of these seemed weird, because why would a website called NYC Breaking, that's presumably about breaking news in New York City, be covering the death of a not-famous woman in Canada? But when Marcus began to click through and read the obituaries that these small time news sites had written for his friend, the weirdness just got weirder.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  The names of her siblings and her parents were incorrect. Her age was reported off as high as 15 years. And like, how can you get someone's age wrong or the name of their parents in an obituary? That's like, gotta be step one or two, like, the basic facts of the person.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Initially, it might have been easy to shrug this off as just sloppy reporting. But over the next few days, more of these weird obituaries began popping up on the internet. And while there was no doubt that the person they were referring to was indeed his friend, because they mentioned her name and the city she lived in and the company she worked for, aside from some vague platitudes about how she, quote, "believed that workplaces should be supportive environments and also embraced the thrill of winter sports," nearly every other detail in these obituaries was wrong.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  And it kind of felt like, is this AI slop? Or what's going on? And I mean, accessing on the mobile phone, it was like going to a website pre-ad locker in the late 90s, early 2000s, where like every square inch is a pop-up ad and fake links, invisible links, trying to get you to click through all these things. And we ended up basically experiencing this daily for almost a week and a half until the official obituary was released.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Marcus made a list of all the webpages that ran erroneous obituaries for his friend. But at this point, nearly all of them have been taken down. Once the family published their official obituary, the random ones just sort of slipped back into the ether. But all these weeks later, he still has a lot of questions about what he experienced. When someone dies, there's always this feeling that they're slipping through your grasp, that their memory gets harder to hang on to as time goes on. And these obituaries with banal platitudes, funhouse mirror distortions, and outright falsehoods were already eroding the public memory of the person he loved. And it makes him angry. He feels convinced that this whole operation was designed to exploit his grief for online

• 6:04Speaker 01

  ad revenue, but he's curious about who's making that money and how exactly the operation works. Are these sites being run by lazy journalists using AI to write obituaries at scale? Are they bots without any human intervention? Are all of these sites connected through some online obituary syndicate? Or are they actually competitors racing to scoop each other on the greatest human tragedy? And there's one more thing.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  The thing that burns my brisket is that I can't figure out how they knew she passed away because the official announcement didn't happen for like nine days. And these things started popping up within a day or two.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Oh, this one makes me angry. Like, I'm mad for you. I'm mad on your behalf. And like, I understand that we live in a cynical world of people who are all struggling to get by and are willing to screw each other over to do so. But around matters of death, it just feels really nasty to me, you know?

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a question? If you don't feel comfortable answering this, feel free not to answer. How do you think that your friend would feel about all this?

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Well, hmm. I think she would find it. She would definitely find the humor in it instantly. And she would probably think of like, an amazingly sharp witty comment to like, capture the whole situation. 65 seconds before anyone else's brain could compute that up. It was so sharp, Alex, and just like such a great wit. I'm sure she would have like a great slogan, a pun with the word obituary and definitely found the humor in it.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Well, I guarantee you that someone out there knows what's going on. So give me a couple of weeks and I'll get back to you on this.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Okay, so in the past, I could figure out exactly who was behind these websites using a specialized search tool called a Who Is lookup. All I have to do is go to a website called whois.sc and then enter the URL of one of these websites, and the search tool would come back to me with the name and contact information for whoever it was that registered the domain. But as I mentioned in a previous episode, that tool is now largely ineffective for tasks like this. In 2018, sweeping policy changes were made to the internet, and as a result of those changes, all new website registrations are automatically set to private.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  So now, when I do a Who Is lookup on a site like Memoir News 360, it no longer shows me who registered that domain. It just tells me that the information is private. So unfortunately, I can't just call one of these guys and ask like, who are you and what is this operation you're running? Fortunately, I don't have to, because someone else already did that. How you doing, Joe? Thanks for doing this.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  This is Joe Supan. He's a senior reporter at CNET, and he usually writes about technology and broadband. But the reason he started looking into these AI obituaries is because back in January of 2024, his family found themselves facing this very same issue. And it started the morning after his sister died.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  The day after my sister died, I remember like this very clear moment where my mom and my dad and I were driving to her husband's house, and my mom got a call from my aunt saying she had seen this obituary on Facebook and like, did we write that or where was this coming from? Seemed a little fishy. So she sent it to my mom, and my mom started reading it in the car, and all these inaccuracies jumped out immediately.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  There were details in the obituary that would have flagged for anyone who knew Joe's sister. But there were also details that should have flagged for anyone at all, like her reported cause of death was autism.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  I was offended and I was repulsed by it. I also felt fascinated by it. I was like, where were these details coming from? Like, who is writing these pages? Just how is this whole process working?

• 10:23Speaker 01

  So Joe began to investigate. And what he found was not some high-tech criminal syndicate, but a basic clickbait scheme powered by AI and human grief. According to Joe, it generally begins on Facebook with an open post from someone who loved someone, sharing the news that that someone has died. And if the post contains certain phrases, think tragic loss or taken too soon, an alert will get triggered. This is someone to watch. From there, scammers will monitor Google search trends to see if people online are searching for information about this person that's died. And frequently, when people die young or unexpectedly, as was the case with Marcus's friend, there are a lot of people searching.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  People want information about what happened to this person. And that's where these AI obituary writers jump in.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Suddenly, that first Facebook post and any subsequent engagement from the comments, it all becomes grist for the mill. Scammers will scrape through social media for information about this person and their life, and then feed it to the AI, which quickly stitches together something resembling a formal obituary. It doesn't matter if there's barely any actual information, or if the information's wrong, or if the AI hallucinated nearly every detail of this person's life. Because ultimately, it's just bait to lure confused, grieving people from Facebook or Google search results onto websites they would never otherwise visit, generating page views that translate into ad dollars for as long as people are searching for the information,

• 12:01Speaker 01

  which often ends the moment the family's able to collect themselves enough to write their own official obituary.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  But who exactly is running these sites?

• 12:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was a little harder to figure out, but I did end up getting to talk to one person who runs some of these websites.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  And like, how did you even find that person? Because back in the day, I would have used the who is lookup, but now I don't know what I'd do.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was just messaging a bunch of these obituary pages on Facebook and some of them would be ostensibly news websites, like that would cover any, like, crime obituaries, anything like that. Some of them were purporting to be reporters who were covering this news. I probably messaged like 50 of these types of accounts. And then I just got lucky, I just, someone responded to me and he actually said, like, you've messaged me a bunch, like, all of the, this account, that account, those are all me. So, and he agreed to talk to me.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  What did he tell you about the gig? Like, how does he set this up? And, you know, did he tell you what kind of money he's making? Like, who even is he?

• 13:18Speaker 03

  He was a guy in Nigeria. He said he makes about a hundred dollars a week on it. I was, kept asking him, like, are you worried that this information could be wrong? Or like, that you might be hurting people who are grieving with this practice? And he was very insistent that, like, he fact checks all his information and it goes through this thorough process, like, everything he posts is accurate.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  But when you would look at some of the obituaries, it was like, there's no way that this is fact checked in any, like, thorough way.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  So I guess my question is, like, the average person isn't going to get a ton of visits to their obituary. So how are the people making these sites making money?

• 14:04Speaker 03

  It's probably pennies per page view, less than that even. I think it's just they're casting such a wide net and so much of the work is automated. Like, I even think this guy I talked to was more of a mom and pop operation than what is standard for these websites. I think he was actually typing these things into ChatGPT himself. I think the more common route is probably that there are just like alerts set up on Facebook for these certain terms and it's all automated. I don't think there's much of a human hand in any of it. But I just think because there's such a volume of engagement and interest and when people pass away and there's like, it's such a low barrier for entry, even if you're only getting

• 14:47Speaker 03

  a penny per page view or something like that, it can add up.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  So initially, when Marcus reached out to us with this problem, he presented it as one of two things. Either this was a lazy little nothing problem or a crazy bot farm syndicate. Now we knew it wasn't a crazy bot farm syndicate, but it wasn't a lazy little nothing problem either. Like so much of the other trash on the internet, we'd learned that this fake obituary scam is an AI-powered volume play. The idea is to do as little work as possible, to get as much attention as possible, to earn as much money as possible from the online ad economy. And that's more or less the end of the story. Except it didn't really feel like the end of the story.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Because the longer I sat with this idea that these websites are bankrolled by ad dollars, the less it made sense to me. Like, just thinking about the way I felt when I visited some of these websites, it certainly didn't put me in a buying kind of mood.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  In fact, the experience of being there was actually pretty repellent, which led me to ask a question that in all my years of reporting on the internet, I never even thought to ask. Why would real companies spend real dollars to buy ads on fake websites? And the answer, which completely shocked me, is that generally speaking, they don't know they're there. Now, I genuinely did not know any of this. But when it comes to online advertising, the way the system is set up actually makes it very difficult for advertisers to know where their ads are appearing. And this issue has been called the financial engine of not just this particular fake obituary

• 16:40Speaker 01

  scam, but of fake news, health hoaxes, and AI slop all across the internet. So we're going to spend some time talking about this online ad system. We're going to talk about how it works and how it came to be. And the person that's going to help us do that is professor of journalism at UMass Amherst, Joshua Braun.

• 17:02Speaker 04

  It used to be that if you wanted to sell shoes, that you would place an ad in a running magazine because that was a good proxy for that consumer. Or if you wanted to sell to people in Philadelphia, you would put an ad in the Philly Inquirer, right? The publications became proxies for different audiences.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  But there was a problem with this system. Advertisers never knew how many of their customers were actually seeing these ads. So there was always this sense that they were wasting some amount of money. They just didn't know how much. And that's where the internet stepped in with a promise to solve the waste issue using personal data to drive targeted ads.

• 17:41Speaker 04

  So we all know that we're tracked massively online and now location tracking on our phones. And there's just an enormous sort of commercial surveillance industry around like sort of looking at all of our behavior and everything else. But now the promise of this is, right, that we can surveil people wherever they are and place an ad at the best moment, right, as opposed to in the best publication.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  So thanks to this new technology, advertisers could put their ads in front of their customers no matter where they are on the internet. And at the end of the month, Google, or whoever they purchased their ads through, would come back with a report showing exactly how many of their customers actually saw the ad. For advertisers, it seemed like a perfect system, a seller's utopia. And then the cracks started to show.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  The first major reckoning happened after the 2016 election, when more than 100 companies, including Kellogg's and Procter & Gamble, discovered that their ads had been running on sites peddling political disinformation, radical extremism, and hate speech. Which, again, means they had been funding that stuff. And maybe you think they didn't actually just discover this? Like, maybe you think that's just what they said to save face when their customers discovered it and got pissed off? And honestly, I probably would have thought that, too. But then I learned that in 2021, both Pfizer and the CDC discovered they'd been running ads on COVID conspiracy sites. So, yeah, I believe.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Anyway, in the wake of these discoveries, these big, powerful companies started grappling with the fact that this system they'd put so much faith in might not be working exactly the way they'd hoped it would. But when they asked, "How in the world could this happen?", the answer wasn't super clear.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  So, the digital advertising system is built in a way that is pretty complex and pretty opaque. Essentially, the idea is that every time that you visit a webpage, you know, assuming you don't have an ad blocker turned on or something like that, and there's just milliseconds it takes the page to load, there's an auction going on for your attention.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  So the publisher, that's the webpage, will put up space for sale in this auction, and advertisers will bid for the privilege of putting their ad in front of your eyes when the page loads. And by the time the page is finished loading and the ad appears, the auction's already over. So because this whole thing happened so quickly, it has to be automated.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  And because this whole thing is automated, you need something like a digital auction block, and these are the ad exchanges.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Think of an ad exchange as like a digital auction block. If this were a real auction block, there'd be a buyer on one side and a seller on the other, and there'd be a guy in the middle brokering that exchange. But when it comes to online ad exchanges, there can be anywhere from four to seven middlemen inserting themselves in this process. And this is where the trouble happens. Because generally speaking, in the digital space, the buyer and the seller never actually meet each other. In fact, they never even show up to the auction. Instead, the buyer's side sends a representative with instructions for how to conduct their business, and the seller's side sends a representative with instructions on how to conduct their business, and then that business gets brokered by an ad network, or sometimes even multiple ad networks,

• 20:57Speaker 01

  who coordinate with data management platforms to make sure the ad gets shown to the right customer. And it's okay if you didn't keep track of all of that. Because the point of this is just that it is a very Byzantine, convoluted system that plays out in milliseconds with basically zero oversight, and everyone involved is taking a cut.

• 21:15Speaker 04

  And so what ends up happening is because there's so many different intermediaries there, and we haven't even talked about like ad agencies and other stuff like that, it's hard for one end to tell what's happening on the other end. And oftentimes, like the kinds of reports that advertisers provided about where their ads are appearing are like kept at the very general level, either because the data is not available or because the people who are dealing with the advertisers would rather not share. So essentially, like advertisers don't necessarily know where their ads are appearing. That opens up an opportunity for people to spin up really spammy sites and run ads on them. And that's how the dirty deed gets done.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  In the aftermath of these big public reckonings, there have been efforts to reform the system. Advertisers have demanded more vetting of the websites in the ad exchanges. They've demanded more transparency about where their ads end up. And more overall accountability from the online ad industry, which handles hundreds of billions of dollars in advertiser funds every year. But so far, the vast majority of reforms have either fallen short or failed completely. Websites containing disinformation, propaganda, medical hoaxes, and fake obituaries continue to find their way into the ad exchanges. And unsuspecting advertisers continue to pay for the privilege of running their ads there. And that's not even their biggest issue.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  It's estimated that more than $100 billion is being stolen through the online ad exchange every single year. Through bot farm operations, through web spoofing, and sometimes through complex systems that make the ad exchange think an ad has been displayed on a website, when in fact, it hasn't been displayed anywhere at all. Ad fraud is currently the second largest criminal enterprise in the world, just after drugs, except that unlike drugs, nobody in the ad fraud world is getting prosecuted. So aside from the advertisers, nobody involved in this thing seems particularly invested in trying to reform it.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  And that, my friends, is why the internet has become such a cesspool. In my conversation with Josh, he introduced me to a couple of concepts that I thought were really instructive in understanding why this system is so backwards and so messed up. And he did so by way of historical analogy to the meltdown of a nuclear power plant.

• 23:38Speaker 04

  So you've heard of Three Mile Island, the nuclear plant? So they had like a partial meltdown, and I think it was 1979, and they had a couple of like big blue ribbon panels that looked at it and what were the causes and all this type of thing, and trying to retroactively assign blame. But there was a professor, a sociologist, Charles Perrow, and he did his own investigation into it. And he came to a conclusion that a lot of people really struggled with and have struggled with for many years, which is that there's certain ways in which you can design a system where essentially the problems are inevitable and really difficult to reform in any meaningful way.

• 24:17Speaker 04

  And he landed on two types of issues that when they are combined, create one of these systems.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  The first issue was something that he called interactive complexity.

• 24:31Speaker 04

  And that's where all of the different moving pieces interact in ways that you can't really predict.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  So unlike a linear system where one domino falls into the next domino, and it's really easy to see when and where the system went wrong, when you're dealing with an interactively complex system, problems are both hard to predict and also hard to identify.

• 24:52Speaker 04

  The other thing that he was zeroing in on was what he called tight coupling.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  And we can think about tight coupling as like high levels of automation, right? Systems that are working so quickly that when problems arise, it is very difficult to step in and fix things before the process keeps going.

• 25:11Speaker 04

  And what he said is you could have an organization that deals in technology and they could have either one of those problems and they're manageable. But if you have both of them together, it's really difficult to deal with this. And the reason is because the sort of solutions that you might impose pull in opposite directions. So if you've got the system where the problems have to do with really high levels of automation, great, you create a checklist of what to do in situations A, B, and C. And then when something goes wrong, the employee in charge just has to pull the lever, right? Or if you've got the system that's very interactively complex, you know that you need people to like be able to kind of stop and troubleshoot on the ground and so on. But if you have both of those things together, there are different management strategies.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  One is a very top-down thing, the other is very bottom-up. And so it's really hard to manage for both at the same time. And so what he said basically is if you have a system that's like that, that at some point it is definitely going to fail. And the reason this was all controversial is because a lot of the systems that he identifies being like this are ones that people would like to believe are going to work, right? Nuclear power and things of that nature, right? And so he's saying that these accidents don't necessarily happen frequently, but they are going to happen. And so my thought about how this all relates to the digital advertising space is that it has all of the features that he was talking about, right? There is, it's hard to imagine a system that is more tightly coupled. It is extremely automated, it is extremely fast.

• 26:39Speaker 04

  There are billions of these transactions going on every day, probably every hour. It is also incredibly interactively complex with all of these different vendors and advertisers and publishers like connecting to the same system. It means that by default, it's going to be really difficult to manage. And so the failures are going to be inevitable. The big difference though, and I think the reason- The reason that people don't capture or appreciate this is that when it comes to the nuclear plant, it's a big mushroom cloud. It is highly noticeable if something goes wrong, or it's, you know, an entire city being evacuated. But when it comes to digital advertising, it's a Pepsi ad showing up on a porn site, or it's a Volvo commercial

• 27:22Speaker 04

  that gets viewed by a bot. And all of it is easy to laugh off. But when it scales, at the scale we're talking about, all those things create a huge amount of like, sort of, negative consequence. You know, you've got tens of millions of dollars in advertising that monetize COVID disinformation. You've got health scams. You've got the obituary stuff, right? And so it's a system that is both really difficult, maybe impossible to reform in the way that it's running now. And it has really bad negative consequences for everybody. And I don't know that you can fix it without scrapping it, essentially.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  After the break, can the internet be fixed?

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Welcome back to the show. So before the break, we met a normal guy named Marcus, whose encounter with AI obituaries had him talking about rabbit holes and syndicates. Marcus had a bunch of questions about why these things exist, who's behind them, how they operate. And we answered all of those questions, but it left us with some of our own. Specifically, we wanted to know why there was a market for these at all. Why would anyone pay to place their ads on these sites? And what we learned is, they don't. The way the digital advertising system is set up makes it very difficult for advertisers to know where their ads are ending up. And this AI obituary scam, and so much of the

• 29:13Speaker 01

  fake news and health hoaxes and extremism that we see online are all downstream effects of this reality. So before reporting back to Marcus, we wanted to find out, what can be done to change this system? And look, I'm not going to lie to you. There are a lot of people who say that there's actually nothing we can do. And the people saying this aren't just podcasters and doomsayers. These are people who actually study this stuff. They say that the issues we see in the ad tech space are built into the internet itself. And if we wanted to fix them, we'd have to tear the whole thing down and rebuild it from scratch. But thankfully, we spoke to one person who does not agree with that sentiment.

• 29:53Speaker 05

  My name is Claire Atkins, and I am the CEO of Check My Ads. We're the digital advertising watchdog. At the highest level, we keep you safe from lies, scams, and manipulation on the internet. We work on behalf of regular citizens, but also publishers, especially publishers of the news, and advertisers who often don't know where their ads are going.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Look, I know it may seem like we just chose to end the story with the one optimist in the digital advertising space. But honestly, everyone we spoke to told us that we had to talk to Claire. They told us Claire and her colleagues know more about this issue and this ecosystem than anyone else out there. And that's partially because they used to be a part of it.

• 30:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, we were in the ecosystem. We were building marketing funnels on behalf of software companies. And we started asking questions like, you know, why are all the tools that I'm using to sell software being used to radicalize people or spread lies?

• 30:53Speaker 01

  And was there like a catalyzing moment or an event that made you go, you know what? The world needs an organization that's policing this and giving consumers information about what's happening online.

• 31:05Speaker 05

  I met my business partner in 2019 after she had run a very public social media campaign called Sleeping Giants, which had taken 90% of Breitbart's ad revenue away because advertisers hadn't known that they were funding Breitbart.com. When they found out, they left. Breitbart lost 90% of the $8 million that they were planning to make in 2017. And then three years later, when I met her, we were asking each other, why isn't this problem solved? And since then, it's just been open door after open door. We've just figured out more and more issues inside the internet. And we've also figured out a lot of ways of trying to solve them.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Since the founding of CheckMyAds in 2021, they've been running investigations on the digital ad space, pressuring the industry to set standards and enforce them, and working with lawmakers to shape legislation aimed at keeping your data out of the hands of advertisers and making sites that profit from fake obits and fake news just a little bit harder to profit from. And one of the things that they've learned is that we already have the technology to fix the digital ad exchange. We created that technology to regulate another famously complicated system: the stock market.

• 32:21Speaker 05

  This industry, the ad system, even though it's trafficking in nearly a trillion dollars in USD every year, it is not regulated like a stock market. And we think it could be. It could have, for instance, know-your-customer laws, where the advertisers know who they're working with along the way for the ad to get to the website. It could also have transparency laws, where the advertisers know exactly where their ads have gone and get a report hourly, or daily, at the very least. We also think there should be a regulatory environment where someone is keeping track of this, kind of an SEC for digital advertising. The SEC could create a division. They have for crypto, for example.

• 33:06Speaker 05

  But someone needs to be keeping track and keeping track of ad tech companies that are scamming, keeping track of international ad tech companies that are collecting our data. There's just an incredible risk when you look at the system, so what it is capable of. And there is a lot of blue sky that we could fill with really smart regulation that we actually don't even have to invent.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  So it sounds like the technology's already there, and it seems like it would be not too difficult to apply. What is standing in the way of applying this technology?

• 33:41Speaker 05

  It just takes time. This isn't even applying technology. This is applying the will to regulate. We need people who understand the technology to be in a place to set standards and enforce them on behalf of the public and on behalf of business, just like we do every other supply chain, just like we do every other economy.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  In the meantime, Claire says there's already been major progress in this fight to clean up the digital ad space. More than 20 states have enacted data protection laws, some of which allow their citizens to opt out of consumer surveillance programs entirely. And then last year, a judge for the US District Court of Virginia ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly over the ad tech space. And while it's still unclear what, if any, impact that ruling will have over the ad tech space, even the fact that the courts are paying attention to this issue feels like progress. Before we said goodbye to Claire, I asked her if there was anything that our listeners might be able to do to improve the digital advertising landscape now. And she said, yes, definitely.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  On the advertiser's side, Claire recommends that companies seriously audit their ad campaigns. Forget high-level performance reports from ad tech companies. These are only going to show you the surface-level stuff that they want you to see. Instead, ask for log-level data. This will give you the most comprehensive view of where your ads appeared. And then audit the shit out of that list. If you find discrepancies between the log-level data and the campaign standards that you were promised, demand cash refunds. You are entitled to them. And the more that these companies are forced to bear the financial burden of their shady practices, the more likely they are to change. But also, if they can, companies should try to cut out the middlemen.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Bring more of their marketing people in-house and use private marketplaces wherever possible. There's so much money in this ecosystem that's getting wasted on middlemen, and they have very little incentive to ethically manage your money or accurately audit their own work. So fuck them. As for the consumer side, that is the side where someone like Marcus might encounter an AI obituary for someone he cares about, Claire had this to say.

• 35:53Speaker 05

  If you are a person who has been affected by this problem, first of all, I'm sorry it's happening. It's awful. There are two people you can contact that would mess up the website's business model. The first is any advertiser that you see on that website. They might not be big-brand advertisers, but if they have a website, they will have a contact page and you can contact them. And you can say, hey, do you know that you're monetizing this website that is incredibly harmful? Please check your ads. The second group of people that you could contact is anyone who is a middleman who is monetizing this website.

• 36:34Speaker 05

  Literally, when you see the URL, go to the top domain, type in ads.txt. And if they are monetizing with ads, you'll see a list of all of the ad tech companies that are monetizing. And these ad tech company names, they're bizarre, okay? You're not going to be familiar with them. But if you Google them, they also have contact pages. And you can say, hey, you're monetizing this website that is deeply harmful to our community. You need to check your inventory. Usually, they don't like getting those emails. And if they think the public is watching them, then they invest a lot more in that kind of inventory moderation.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. This is a syndicate of sinister rabbit hole madness.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  When we followed up with Marcus, we were initially a little worried that he'd be disappointed that the AI obituary scam turned out to be a pretty run-of-the-mill clickbait operation. But when we started to explain the digital advertising ecosystem that gave birth to this run-of-the-mill clickbait operation, he enthusiastically and correctly pointed out that, in fact, there was a syndicate after all. And the truth is, we really only scratched the surface of this particular rabbit hole. But now that it's on our radar, I suspect we're going to be spending a lot more time digging into this particular patch of the internet.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. Oh, my God. This is, this is exactly what our favorite types of investigations are. They start as one thing, and then they end up becoming so much deeper and so much larger and so much more insane than you could even imagine when you start the ride. Truly, one of my favorite hyperfix roller coaster rides that I've been a part of.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Well, Marcus, thank you so much for coming to us with a question. And oh, wait, there is one more thing.

• 38:26Speaker 06

  Where do you get my number from, man? Where do you get my number?

• 38:29Speaker 01

  So you know how at the beginning of the episode, I said that I'd essentially lost the tools I needed to track down website scammers? Well, in the course of investigating this story, we connected with a journalist named Craig Silverman, who is an expert on digital deception. And initially, the plan was that we were going to talk about the world of scam sites and ad fraud. And we definitely did that. But also, I sent him a list of the websites that ran AI obituaries for Marcus's friend. And Craig took it upon himself to track down one of the scammers behind these sites. This scammer, who you just heard on the phone a moment ago, initially agreed to an interview with us. But unfortunately, at the last minute, he ghosted us and he blocked our number.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  But next week on the premium feed, Craig Silverman is going to give us step-by-step instructions explaining the tools he used and how he used them to find this guy. So yeah, hope to see you then.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Hyperfixed is produced and edited by Emma Cortland, Amor Yates, Tori Dominguez-Pique, and Sari Soffers-Sukinak. It was engineered by Tony Williams. The music is by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and me. Special thanks this week to Joshua Braun for letting me email him nonstop, and to Craig Silverman, who helped us track down our scammer. You can check out his newsletter, which is both in-depth reporting on things like scams, disinformation, media manipulation, and spyware, as well as resources and tutorials to investigate them yourself at indicator.media. And you can hear the master at work on our next bonus episode. If you want to become a member to hear that episode, you can do so at hyperfixedpod.com/join. Hyperfixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX,

• 40:23Speaker 01

  a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at radiotopia.fm. Thanks so much for listening.