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Activism, Advertising, and Far-Right Media: the Case of Sleeping Giants

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University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Journalism Faculty Publication Series Journalism 2019 Activism, Advertising, and Far-Right Media: The Case of Sleeping Giants Joshua A. Braun John D. Coakley Emily West Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/journalism_faculty_pubs Media and Communication (ISSN: 2183–2439) 2019, Volume 7, Issue 4, Pages 68–79 DOI: 10.17645/mac.v7i4.2280 Article Activism, Advertising, and Far-Right Media: The Case of Sleeping Giants Joshua A. Braun 1,*, John D. Coakley 1 and Emily West 2 1 Journalism Department, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003, USA; E-Mails: [email protected] (J.A.B.), [email protected] (J.D.C.) 2 Communication Department, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003, USA; E-Mail: [email protected] * Corresponding author Submitted: 18 June 2019 | Accepted: 10 October 2019 | Published: 17 December 2019 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 Breitbart News. 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 Breitbart 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 ex- amines 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. Keywords activism; corporate social responsibility; hate speech; hyper-partisan news; online activism; online advertising; programmatic advertising; Sleeping Giants Issue This article is part of the issue “Peripheral Actors in Journalism: Agents of Change in Journalism Culture and Practice” edited by Avery E. Holton (University of Utah, USA), Valerie Belair-Gagnon (University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, USA), and Oscar Westlund (Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway / Volda University College, Norway / University of Gothenburg, Sweden). © 2019 by the authors; licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu- tion 4.0 International License (CC BY). 1. Introduction supported journalism presents an opportunity to finally divorce journalism from the pressures of the market by Amid the economic collapse of many ad-driven news introducing public funding mechanisms. They draw on publications in the US and elsewhere, a conversation the work of Baker (2001) and others, delineating various has emerged among media critics and journalism schol- ways in which reliance on advertising distorts the pub- ars about the future, or lack thereof, of ad-supported lic mission of journalism. At least some of these schol- journalism. Positions within this dialogue are nuanced ars see efforts to restore advertising subsidies to news and it is thus more accurate to speak of a spectrum of as fundamentally misguided, akin to begging back into a viewpoints than sides in a debate. On one end are schol- bad relationship. ars like Habermas (2007), Pickard (2014), or McChesney On the other end of the aforementioned spectrum, and Nichols (2010), who argue the economic crisis in ad- scholars like Couldry and Turow (2014) and academic Media and Communication, 2019, Volume 7, Issue 4, Pages 68–79 68 researchers affiliated with the Global Disinformation wing “hyper-partisan news” sites, best exemplified by Index (Melford & Fagan, 2019)—while not averse to the ascendance of Breitbart News over the course of the the notion of publicly funded journalism—are more fo- 2016 US presidential election; and 2) the opportunities cused on the recent impact of behaviorally targeted ad- and threats created within the news ecosystem by con- vertising on news organizations and their output. They temporary programmatic advertising. To set the stage, frame many of the harms to which digital advertis- we introduce both here. ing has contributed—the revenue crisis at news orga- nizations, the rise of click-driven editorial strategies, 1.1. Right-Wing Hyper-Partisan News new opportunities for ad fraud, and heightened mon- etary incentives for the spread of disinformation and A well-known study conducted by Faris et al. (2017) hate speech—as potentially addressable by reforms that confirmed what many media watchers had already would limit fraud, abuse, and marketing surveillance suspected—namely that Breitbart News, famously de- while returning greater advertising subsidies to profes- scribed by its erstwhile executive chairman Steve Bannon sional news organizations. as a home for the “alt-right,” had dominated the informa- In other words, this spectrum of opinion ranges from tion diet of conservative social media users in the US dur- revolution to reform—from those who would like to dis- ing the 2016 presidential election. Throughout this time, mantle news organizations’ relationship with advertising the site played a substantial role in driving the agenda to those who see the relationship as reparable. As we dis- of partisan conservative outlets across the web, rang- cuss in this article, this difference in opinion also turns ing from relatively popular publications to sites at the up in significant ways across activist campaigns targeting fringes, the latter of which at times drew on Breitbart’s the advertising industry. more conspiratorial framings of the news to spin up out- Sleeping Giants is a novel activist campaign aimed at right hoaxes. Not only had Breitbart and its ilk come digital advertising that serves as an important provoca- to dominate conservative media, they also played an tion, both in the world of media activism and in the aca- agenda-setting role, drawing mainstream news outlets demic policy debates surrounding the appropriate rela- into covering their favored topics, if only to contest the tionship between journalism and advertising in the 21st original, misleading coverage, or the conspiracy theories century. Based on interviews with the activists them- that evolved from it (Phillips, 2018). selves, this study examines Sleeping Giants with respect While Breitbart stories have often been flagged as se- to its continuity with media activism of previous eras, lective and misleading in their interpretation of current while also seeking to understand its potential as one of events, perhaps of greatest concern to critics is that the the first high-profile activist campaigns to grapple with site’s coverage often toes or crosses the line into hate the recent impacts of programmatic advertising on the speech, pushing frames and inflammatory headlines that news ecosystem. single out women, migrants, and ethnic minorities in The Sleeping Giants campaign centers around two in- troubling ways (see Figure 1). Outside the US, other far- tertwined issues: 1) The rapid rise in popularity of right- right partisan sites like Boulevard Voltaire (BV; France) Figure 1. Examples of inflammatory Breitbart News headlines. Media and Communication, 2019, Volume 7, Issue 4, Pages 68–79 69 and Nyheter Idag (Sweden) create similarly problematic the public interest while avoiding responsibility for poor content, at times apparently influenced by material from outcomes. Other researchers have similarly argued that Breitbart itself. A common feature among these sites is some combination of outside forces—political activism, that they are monetized, in whole or in part, through pro- possibly followed by government regulation—are likely grammatic advertising. to be necessary precursors for reform (e.g., Couldry & Turow, 2014; Pickard, 2014). 1.2. Programmatic Advertising It was significant, then, when the public controver- sies surrounding “fake news” and sites like Breitbart Much of the online advertising ecosystem has come to News in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election be dominated by programmatic advertising. While pro- arguably created a new concern for editorial context on grammatic advertising can take a number of forms, most the part of advertisers. Braun and Eklund (2019) quote commonly it consists of an online auction that occurs ad-tech executive Charlie Tillinghast on this point: each time a web page is loaded, in which a publisher puts up ad space for sale along with details on the user As long as [brands] were reaching the person they about to view it. Advertisers bid on the attention of the wanted, then they were less concerned about the con- user based on their perceived desirability as a customer. text [in which their ad appeared]. But now they’re be- Intermediaries known as ad-tech firms handle the details ing accused of essentially funding fake news or…hate of each transaction. These intermediaries are numerous speech or conspiracies…by virtue of the fact that their (though they are often owned by the same tech giants) ad is running on that site. That’s different. (p. 16) and it is not uncommon for a single transaction to involve four or more ad-tech companies. The resulting complex- This moment of tension and vulnerability created an ity of each transaction, combined with the fact that pro- opening for creative activism, which was seized most suc- grammatic advertising tends to focus advertisers’ atten- cessfully by Sleeping Giants. tion on reaching desirable users at the expense of edi- torial context, has meant that until recently advertisers 2.
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