Sleeping Giants has a confirmed list of 2,822 advertisers that have blocked their ads from appearing on brietbart.
Sleeping Giants’ basic approach is to make Breitbart’s advertisers aware that they are, in fact, Breitbart advertisers. Many apparently don’t know this, given that Web ads are often bought through third-party brokers, such as Google and Facebook. The brokers then distribute them to a network of websites according to algorithms that seek a specific target audience (say, young men) or a set number of impressions.
As a result of such “programmatic” buying, advertisers often are in the dark about where their ads end up. Advertisers can opt out of certain sites, of course, but only if they affirmatively place them on a blacklist of sites.
So when an ad appears on Breitbart, Sleeping Giants or one of its 109,000 Twitter followers and 35,000 Facebook followers flag the advertiser, often accompanied by an image of the sponsors’ ad next to a Breitbart story.
The other day, for example, a Sleeping Giants follower tweeted at Country Inns, informing the hotel chain that it was advertising on “the racist Breitbart site.” Within a day, the company tweeted back: “Thank you for your concern. . . . We have added Breitbart to our blacklist of ads.”
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Breitbart, based in Los Angeles and Washington, says it doesn’t know how many advertisers have blocked it, nor has it calculated how much revenue it has lost as a result. But the financial impact appears to be significant enough for Breitbart to take the group seriously.
“What they’re doing is a very dangerous thing,” says Alexander Marlow, Breitbart’s editor in chief. “They are trying to impose corporate censorship and corporate segregation on us, and they’re doing it anonymously.” He disputes the group’s underlying claim, calling it “a lie” that Breitbart promotes hate speech of any kind.
Now there is a reason to visit brietbart, to join in the fight to defund bigotry one tweet at a time.