Have you heard of Sleeping Giants? It’s an online organization, founded on Twitter to amplify the voices of consumers. Sleeping Giants pushes companies to stop advertising on hate stations. You can join the fight!
Why Twitter?
On Twitter, one tweet can reach millions of people. If you don’t know how Twitter works, see the Twitter Tutorial. Twitter and Sleeping Giants let thousands of people keep watch for hate media ads from normal companies. When anybody sees hate media ads associated with a mainstream brand, they notify the brand and Sleeping Giants. Sleeping Giants amplifies their voice, and hundreds of people join in, adding their feedback. Sleeping Giants helps hundreds to thousands of people give feedback to mainstream companies. Hate is bad for business.
Here’s how you can get involved:
First, create a Twitter account and login, as described.
- Go to Breitbart News or Fox News and take a screenshot of a company’s ad next to offensive content.
- Tweet the shot with a polite, non-offensive note, to the company’s twitter account.
- Include a tag of Sleeping Giants (@slpng_giants) so they can keep track.
Here’s an example from February 2, 2018.
More Information
Sleeping Giants was started in 2016, by a group of anonymous volunteers who were horrified by racist, xenophobic, sexist, homophobic and anti-Semitic messages that they saw on entertainment networks. Each of these networks was getting millions of dollars worth of advertising money from mainstream companies who claimed to have significantly different values.
As Sleeping Giants puts it: “It’s about accountability in advertising.” For many of the cases, companies simply put their advertising in the hands of an agency, and the ads were placed by broker. As consumers began complaining, ad revenue to hate-speech shows dropped radically. Companies began to notice what they were affixing their names to, because it matters.
At the start of 2017, 820 companies stopped advertising on Breitbart News. Here is a current spreadsheet of companies who have stopped advertising.
Sleeping Giants Twitter is @slpng_giants.
Sleeping Giants Facebook page is here.
