The Precarious State of Brand Safety and Trust

Brand safety has consistently been a challenge. Recently, however, there are clear signs that it has never been more complex, or more fragile. What began as a set of protective measures against fraudulent impressions and to ensure advertisers avoided adjacency to violent or explicit content has evolved into an ecosystem fraught with reputational risk for marketers.  Whether it’s the growing opacity, lack of reliability in automated enforcement, or the new “ethical tension” marketers are left scrambling on a daily basis.

The latest industry controversies feature Meta’s loss of its Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation and ghastly revelations about digital abuse of student-athletes via social media. The latter of which reveals just how tenuous the balance between brand safety and consumer safety has become.

Meta’s brief accreditation for content-level brand safety on Facebook and Instagram feeds was a milestone, until it wasn’t. Within four months, the MRC rescinded the certification, raising urgent questions about transparency and accountability in the feed environments that dominate global advertising spend. For marketers, that loss is more than troubling given the scale and scope of Meta properties and its ability to target with algorithmic proficiency.  Meta has been able to essentially become one of a select few “one-stop shops” for accumulating targeted impressions at scale.  However, given its strength in the digital world and the easing of ethical judgements, is this a clear indicator of the difficulty of trusting platforms that operate as both a marketplace and safety arbiter?

Meanwhile, the cost of human dysfunction - online - remains impossible to ignore. Signify Group, which recently did an analysis of over 1.3 million social media posts directed at NCAA athletes, found more than 5,000 verified cases of social media abuse. The abuse ranged from racist and homophobic slurs to betting-related threats and violent messages. Women’s basketball players were targeted three times more often than their male counterparts. Here are some of the statistics directly from the report:

• 18% of all abuse was sexual, making it the most prevalent type of abuse used to target male and female student-athletes. 
• 12% of all abuse was related to sports betting, with more than 740 instances. As betting markets increased, so did the prevalence of harassment, with 19% rates in men's basketball and football. Some abuse flagged in other categories indicated that the posts were betting-related.
• 10% of abuse consisted of racist content.
• 9% of abuse was homophobic/transphobic. 
• 6% of abuse, approximately 380 instances, was violent. 
• 80% of the abuse in the study was directed at March Madness student-athletes.
• Women's basketball student-athletes received approximately three times more threats than men's basketball student-athletes.

Such findings expose a devastating truth: “brand safety” cannot be divorced from the broader question of user safety. When social media outlets fail to protect individuals, we all suffer. The integrity of individuals must supersede the integrity of the social media environment, otherwise their worth is diminished, and brands must walk away - leaving environments with relevance and brand potential stymied.

For advertisers and agencies, the path forward requires deeper standards of behavior and compliance, and authentic accountability measures. Audits, third-party verification, and transparent moderation/human oversight policies must become non-negotiable. The digital media industry stands at a crossroads. If it continues to lean into automation and profit-driven platform governance, brand safety will continue to erode - pushing advertisers, necessarily, back toward more curated content.