Hey, folks!

What a week! First the fun news: Sleeping Giants has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize! Yes, that’s three exclamation marks in this email already; no, that’s not too many.

This is an exciting moment for us. Our own Nandini Jammi originally co-founded the campaign take on Breitbart here in the United States. The campaign lost Breitbart over 90% of its ad revenue in just three months.

It was so successful that folks started up local Sleeping Giants accounts around the world to fight hate speech in their own countries — including France, Australia, and Brazil. They have all achieved enormous success in their own right.

This nomination, put forward by French MP Éric Bothorel, encompasses this collective global effort. It also serves as recognition to the hundreds of thousands of people who make up the Sleeping Giants community – and all who use your voice to take a stand with us.

The power of this movement is made possible by you. We're so proud!

Jezebel’s new owner has a request for advertisers: Please stop hurting journalism

Josh Jackson runs Paste, a music and entertainment publication.

So imagine his surprise when he learned the word “song” could strip an entire article of its ad revenue.

That was just one of more than 4,000 “negative keywords” a major advertiser looking to run ads on Paste Magazine included in a brand safety spreadsheet it shared with him.

And now that his magazine resurrected the iconic feminist media outlet Jezebel last November, essential journalism going unfunded because of brand safety concerns has become a more urgent issue. Jezebel has even launched a subscription option to help fund its reporting, filling in a revenue gap created by brand safety tech.

“We've been doing this a long time, but hadn't really felt the effects of brand safety until we purchased Jezebel,” Jackson told Check My Ads. “(We) very quickly got into the deep end on everything brand safety related and it's just been blowing my mind to see.”

Jackson — or anyone who cares about quality journalism — should find this brand safety technology mind-blowing (and not in a good way). Read our full interview with him as we dive into how well-meaning brand safety tech can do more harm than good.

What we’re reading and listening to

• Meet Adalytics, An Asteroid Headed For Ad Tech: Krzysztof Franaszek is a one-man wrecking crew who has taken big swings at some of the biggest problems in adtech and scored direct hits. Just ask Google.
• SpyTalk’s The Taylor Swift Info War Tutorial (Spotify) (Apple): National security journalist Jeff Stein talked to a former US Army “influence ops” specialist about combating conspiracy mongering, and Check My Ads came up while talking about getting companies to pull their ads from disinfo sites: “The only effective approaches to this right now are all grassroots efforts. There are a couple young women I see often on LinkedIn and other social media, Check My Ads.”
• Elon Musk’s Twitter: Everything you need to know. TechCrunch is tracking eeeeeeeeeeeeverything going on with X-formerly-Twitter since Musk took it over, and it’s a great look at how the platform got to the sad state it’s in — unlabeled MrBeast ads included.

Thanks for reading! Hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we’ll see you next week.

Hugs,

Claire & Nandini