The Scale of the Information Environment

Imagine a company that hides who it works with and where billions of dollars flow around the world. That earns its profits financing a global network containing piracy, porn, fraud and disinformation, even doing business with figures sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury, including Russian companies that may access and store data about people browsing websites and apps in Ukraine, potentially opening a mechanism for Russian intelligence to target individuals there. A company that tells the public that it doesn’t make money from guns that nevertheless does business with the maker of the AR-15, the weapon used in so many horrific mass killings, including the recent massacre of teachers and students in Uvalde, Texas. 

Is this some organized crime syndicate or shady offshore shell company? No, it’s Google, one of the biggest and most prominent technology companies on the planet. 

This episode features a conversation with Craig Silverman, a journalist who has spent years uncovering fraud in the opaque world of digital advertising and media manipulation. With his colleagues at ProPublica, in a recent series of articles Silverman employed a unique investigative approach to uncover just exactly how Google operates in a shadowy realm of deceit and disinformation.