Abstract
This study examines the international activist movement known as Sleeping Giants, a social-media “campaign to make bigotry and sexism less profitable” (Sleeping Giants, n.d.). The campaign originated in the US with an anonymous Twitter account that enlisted followers in encouraging brands to pull their online advertising from <em>Breitbart News</em>. The campaign achieved dramatic success and rapidly spread to regions outside the US, with other anonymously run and loosely allied chapters emerging in 15 different nations (as well as a regional chapter for the EU). Many of these were initially created to take on <em>Breitbart</em> advertisers in their home countries, but in a number of cases they subsequently turned their attention to disrupting financial support for other far-right news media in—or impacting—their home countries. Based on interviews with leaders of eight Sleeping Giants chapters, as well as the related UK-based Stop Funding Hate campaign, this study examines the Sleeping Giants campaign with respect to its continuity with media activism of previous eras, while also seeking to understand its potential as one of the first high-profile activist campaigns to grapple with the impacts of programmatic advertising on the news ecosystem. In particular, we consider how the campaign’s interventions speak to the larger debate around the normative relationship between advertising and the performance of the news ecosystem.
Highlights
Amid the economic collapse of many ad-driven news publications in the US and elsewhere, a conversation has emerged among media critics and journalism scholars about the future, or lack thereof, of ad-supported journalism
Based on interviews with the activists themselves, this study examines Sleeping Giants with respect to its continuity with media activism of previous eras, while seeking to understand its potential as one of the first high-profile activist campaigns to grapple with the recent impacts of programmatic advertising on the news ecosystem
At the suggestion of several participants, we interviewed Richard Wilson, the co-founder of the UK-based activist campaign, Stop Funding Hate, which is similar to Sleeping Giants in a number of respects and has interacted substantively with various Sleeping Giants chapters in ways participants viewed as being integral to their efforts
Summary
Amid the economic collapse of many ad-driven news publications in the US and elsewhere, a conversation has emerged among media critics and journalism scholars about the future, or lack thereof, of ad-supported journalism. Media and Communication, 2019, Volume 7, Issue 4, Pages 68–79 researchers affiliated with the Global Disinformation Index (Melford & Fagan, 2019)—while not averse to the notion of publicly funded journalism—are more focused on the recent impact of behaviorally targeted advertising on news organizations and their output They frame many of the harms to which digital advertising has contributed—the revenue crisis at news organizations, the rise of click-driven editorial strategies, new opportunities for ad fraud, and heightened monetary incentives for the spread of disinformation and hate speech—as potentially addressable by reforms that would limit fraud, abuse, and marketing surveillance while returning greater advertising subsidies to professional news organizations.
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