Brand owners are “late to the party” in accepting their moral obligations for funding divisive social media platforms, their lack of support globally for quality news and media and for backing a marketing surveillance economy that has gone too far, says the CEO of the influential Brussels-based World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), Stephan Loerke.

As the federal government prepares to release the ACCC’s Digital Platforms Inquiry within weeks, perhaps days, Mr Loerke last month spearheaded the creation and launch by large brand owners of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media to forge new standards and benchmarks around content and societal damage in the largely unregulated digital media industry.