America has a big disinformation problem, and it's driven by digital advertising and data hoarding

Dipayan Ghosh and Ben Scott wrote for NBC News about trends in digital advertising:

Just after Valentine’s Day last year, New Yorkers were treated to a very unusual digital billboard ad draping one side of the Port Authority in Manhattan. It read: “Dear person who played ‘Sorry’ 42 times on Valentine’s Day, what did you do?”

The ad, which referenced the famous Justin Bieber song, was run by Spotify, the popular streaming music app that boasts more than 70 million global subscribers. It was a hit. Spotify would go on to post versions of the billboard in leading markets around the world. In a further sign of the ad campaign’s influence, Netflix picked up the theme last December with its own tongue-in-cheek tweet about the now infamous movie “A Christmas Prince.” That Tweet was ‘liked’ nearly 454,000 times.