In some cases, the stories being told in ‘native ads’ contradict the stories that are being told by the news outlets that are creating the ads, so there’s a giant conflict of interest. We’ll be looking at the types of stories being told, the degree to which they comport with what’s coming out of the newsroom, and we’ll be writing our own stories about that.
– Michelle
Michelle Amazeen is the Associate Dean of Research and an Associate Professor of Mass Communication at Boston University’s College of Communication. She also directs the Communication Research Center. Dr. Amazeen’s research focuses on persuasion and misinformation, exploring effects of misinformation and efforts to correct it. For her dissertation at Temple University, Michelle wrote about the accuracy of political advertisements. In the early 2000s, fact-checking organizations were newly emerging, and she became interested in how they were holding political actors accountable for the inaccurate claims they were making in their ads, as well as the failure of mainstream news outlets to do that themselves. She wrote the book Content Confusion: News Media, Native Advertising, and Policy in an Era of Disinformation which was published in November 2025.
With MISI, Michelle researched native advertising by fossil fuel companies and their impact on the spread of misinformation in today’s media landscape. “Native advertisements” are ads created by external stakeholders disguised as credible news within a journalistic article.