All These Things That We've Done

Sometimes, all you need to do is wait.

Jim Hoft, founder of conspiracy site the Gateway Pundit, announced last week that the parent company behind it is bankrupt. He blamed “progressive liberal lawfare attacks,” which is a funny way of saying “Nandini did it.”

We laid the groundwork for this in summer 2020. Nandini personally had the site kicked off multiple ad exchanges — including Criteo, Magnite, and AdRoll. 

Then the real end came from filmmaker Aude Favre, who brought the receipts to an interview with a Google rep about their on-going partnership with Gateway Pundit as part of a documentary. 

The rep choked, and Google dropped the site shortly before the documentary premiered. The site clearly never recovered.

She's Here, She's Claire, She's Everywhere

Claire attended Swayable’s Persuade 24 and had a chance to talk with The Drum’s Kendra Barnett. She broke down how adtech can threaten democracy — and more importantly, how to fix it! "There is a real economy flourishing for disinformation and hate, and the adtech system is really to blame for that.” (Check out the full interview!) 

"Advertisers, if they had control over their own campaigns, wouldn't be in the places that are making the world a more unsafe place."

From left: Nandini, Claire, Arielle and Natasha at the Check My Ads NYC fundraiser.

Also last week, a longtime supporter hosted a fundraising event at their home in NYC (holla if you have a space we can do the same in!).

Claire gave a captivating pitch, with our Director of Intelligence Arielle Garcia chiming in, spreading our message of how to strip revenue from hateful content. Nandini, our Development Director Natasha Commissiong, and Her Bold Move were also there!

Dini Done It

🚨Breaking news: Nandini is on today's Fast Politics With Molly Jong-Fast! Give it a listen! We now return you to your regularly scheduled newsletter.

Nandini spoke at Yale as part of its Disentangling Disinformation series and had a great time being her usual Dini self and letting everyone know we need to destroy ads before they destroy us. Look at how hard the invite goes!

And AdWeek had a great story on how Time’s Person of the Year story for Taylor Swift — arguably their largest story of the year — was declared brand unsafe, shutting advertisers out. Nandini explained how this is all the fault of brand safety companies:

“DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science's ‘sophisticated’ contextual intelligence technology is more rudimentary than their sales reps tell you. Their mostly white- and male-run engineering teams train their models to sniff out ordinary words that news outlets need to use everyday like ‘feminism’, ‘racism’ and ‘gay’ — and mark them as brand unsafe.”

Arielle Good Time

Publishers’ revenue struggles paint a bleak picture of what happens when we stand idle while big tech writes the rules. Arielle has the solution: hit a big ol’ reset button on the whole shebang to let publishers reclaim control and chart a better, more sustainable path forward. She laid it all out at Beeler.Tech’s Navigator NYC.

”Big tech has bought their way into every room, every closed-door meeting, where they get to own the narrative, deflect, and keep marketers in the dark,” Arielle said. “This is why sunlight is so powerful. We have to be willing to say the quiet part out loud.”

“There is a huge appetite for change in the industry. And, yes, a select few at the very top trying to cash as many bonus checks as they can before the house of cards collapses. If those people get out faster because of our work, good. That makes way for the rest of us to focus on building a better, sustainable future.”

Arielle also appeared on Digital Trust in the AI World: The Tension Between Privacy and Personalized Marketing, highlighting how advances in targeting put it at odds with privacy advocates (see the whole thing here). And less transparency won’t help anyone.

”Big tech is using AI hype to distract marketers — trying to get them to give up more transparency and more control over where their ads run,” Arielle said. “This is bad for people, for marketers, for publishers, and democracy. Don’t be distracted by the false promises of black-box algorithms. Advertisers have the right to know where their ads are running.”

Rachel Rides to Rideau Hall

Rachel Gilmore spoke at the Canadian Governor General's symposium on online hate last month! She shared her personal experiences of online harassment with people who have the power to do something about it (and you can see a fun lil' TikTok about her whole day here!).

Rachel speaking at Rideau Hall. Credit: MCpl Matthieu Racette / OSGG

Rachel and her family have faced threats because of her reporting on extremism, hate, and disinformation — but she keeps doing the work. Because when journalists are silenced, disinformation fills the void. 

WHEW! That was a lot! Thanks for sticking with us to the end, and we’ll see you all next week!

Hugs,

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