Tech companies newest cause celebre? Boycott Breitbart
Ride-hailing company Lyft joins HP, T-Mobile, Lenovo, Autodesk and others in pulling its ads from the far-right news site. But some companies remain.
Online ad sales aren't something that typically capture the imagination. But throw in corporate shaming with some political wrangling, and the topic gets downright interesting.
After the election of President Donald Trump in November, a secretive organization called Sleeping Giants popped up on Facebook and Twitter. It's mission: "To stop racist websites by stopping their ad dollars."
Sleeping Giants' main target has been Breitbart News, which made headlines Wednesday after students at University of California at Berkeley protested an appearance by one of its columnists. The right-wing news and opinion site, formerly run by senior Trump aide Steve Bannon, has been criticized as a platform for conspiracy theories and racism. Bannon himself called Breitbart "the platform of the 'alt-right,'" a loose, online movement of people promoting the notion of "white identity," including white supremacists and those advocating for a separate white homeland.
Sleeping Giants decided to get companies to block their ads from appearing on the site. And in doing so it learned that because of the way online ads are sold, few advertisers know where their ads appear.
So far about 820 companies have blocked their ads on Breitbart, according to Sleeping Giants. They include big consumer brands like Kellogg's, BMW and Visa, as well as dozens of tech companies, including Autodesk, Lenovo, HP, Okta, Vimeo and T-Mobile's parent company Deutsche Telekom. Ride-hailing company Lyft also decided to block its ads on Breitbart. Uber, which has been called out by Sleeping Giants for its ads on the site, didn't respond to request for comment.
https://www.cnet.com/news/boycott-breitbart-lyft-hewlett-packard-t-mobile-autodesk-uber-amazon/