Ofcom Highlights Lack of Awareness of Sponsored Ads and Fall in Trust in Social Media
There is a lack of awareness of sponsored advertising links on search engines plus a significant amount of people who are not aware of targeted personal advertising or search engine bias, according to the Ofcom Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes Report released yesterday.
The report also shows there has been a fall in trust in social media content.
The majority of internet users (84 per cent) state that they are confident they can recognise advertising online. However, below half of all adults (48 per cent) when shown an example of the results returned by Google for an online search were able to identify sponsored links, despite their being distinguished by a box with the word ‘Ad’ in it.
One in five adults said that if results are listed by a search engine, the websites will be accurate/unbiased. However, 58 per cent of search engine users stated that some of the websites listed on a search engine results page will be accurate/ unbiased while others will not be.
Over half of all internet users (56 per cent) are aware of personalised advertising, and noted that they are aware that other people might see adverts that are different to those they see. However, more than one in four stated that they believed everyone would see the same adverts.
The report also shows that there has been a decline in trust in social media content over the last two years. Since 2015, social media users have become less trusting of the content they consume on social media. One in four respondents (25 per cent) disagreed strongly with the statement: “When I visit social media websites or apps I tend to trust what I read or see”, which is up from 18 per cent in 2015.
The report also highlighted that three in ten of all users (31 per cent) make no checks when judging the accuracy of factual information online. Respondents were prompted with an option of six checks they could make to judge the accuracy of information online; the majority (67 per cent) say they make one or more of these checks.
More than four in 10 (45 per cent) say they look at other websites to see if the same information appears on all of them, one in three (32 per cent) check the website address to see if it looks genuine, one in four (25 per cent) check the credibility of the information (such as the author’s name or link to original publication).