SaTC: CORE: Small: Studying Problematic Content in the Web Advertising Ecosystem

Online ads pervade the daily lives of all web users and underpin the current financial model of the web. In addition to well-designed advertisements for legitimate products and services, many ads contain content that is potentially problematic for the people who see and click on them. For example, ads may use misleading, deceptive, and in some cases, illegal practices.

These ads can have negative impact on web users financially, waste their time and attention, and spread deceptive or misleading claims; they can include misinformation, scams, and malware. The potential harmful impact of these ads threatens to undermine the web’s aspirational role as a trustworthy information source and the reputation and effectiveness of legitimate online advertising revenue.

This project aims to systematically study and classify the problematic content that appears in web ads and measure its impact on people who browse the web. The findings will ultimately lay a foundation for technical or regulatory solutions to improve the quality and authenticity of the web advertising ecosystem.

In this project, the researchers are conducting a systematic investigation into problematic ad content on the web, leveraging techniques including web crawling, ad detection, and in-the-wild user studies. The research draws on perspectives from computer security that predict or anticipate system misuse. The researchers are characterizing, classifying, and measuring the prevalence of problematic content in the online ad ecosystem to discover what problematic ad content exists, where it appears, who is targeted, and which ad providers serve it.

The research uses qualitative and quantitative methods to study people’s perceptions of and interactions with this type of content, asking what users consider problematic, and what impact this content has on users’ time or attention. The research lays a foundation for technical and policy-based defenses for problematic content shown in, and spread through, online ads.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.