You look next to a news article promoting—perhaps even praising—the violent January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. There, you see an ad for a car company. The car company doesn’t want to be associated with an attempted coup. They don’t want you thinking of their cars when you think of murderous traitors. So why’d they put ads on that website?
They didn’t.
Most advertising online is done through ad exchanges. These companies help put ads on websites using information about a user, some information about the website and its content, and a few other factors, not the least of which, is how much a company paid them to elevate their ads. These ad exchanges promise not to put a company’s ads on sites promoting violence. The problem? No one involved knows when a website has become violent. These systems are automated.
That’s where Check My Ads comes in. This non-profit group defunds websites spreading fraudulent and dangerous misinformation, as well as those spreading violence. They do this by reaching out to ad exchanges to get them to pull ads from the site. They’ve had success with these methods before to shut down smaller websites ran by alt-right extremists. Now they’re going after their biggest target yet: Fox News.
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Check My Ads vs Ad Exchanges
The internet runs on ads. What you might not realize is that a person doesn’t pick out what ads go where. Instead, ad exchanges place ads on behalf of customers. They do this almost entirely through automated processes. However, they do make a promise to their customers: they won’t place ads on objectionable websites. These could include websites that are for pornography or, more recently, websites promoting fake news and violence.
Ad exchanges aren’t spending all day browsing the websites they host ads on. Instead, they do an initial review, allow ads, and never really look back. Check My Ads finds evidence of ads on webpages companies wouldn’t want to be associated with. They then contact the ad exchanges with that proof. They do this in large numbers. People add themselves to a newsletter with Check My Ads. They get prompts for emails and who to send them to. From there, an ad exchange is flooded with complaints and evidence they’re serving ads in places they shouldn’t. Now they can’t claim to be upholding their end of their contract with the companies they serve. They have to pull their ads. At that point, it may not even be a decision they can waffle over, it’s a legal obligation.
Do that for all the ad exchanges that deal with reputable companies, and you can bankrupt a website spreading misinformation and promoting violence.
It’s Worked Before
It sounds crazy, right? Some screenshots, a few emails, and suddenly the dangerous site shuts down? Well, it turns out it’s worked. Quite a few times, actually. They’ve gotten ad companies to pull their ads from websites like those owned by Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk, Glenn Beck, Tim Pool, and others. Check My Ads goes after far-right websites promoting disinformation or violence. Right now, their “Defund the Insurrectionists” campaign is targeting what many see as an ally of the seditious insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol: Fox News.
Fox News: A Goliath
The Check My Ads campaign has one huge weakness: it only works online. Fox News makes 95% of their money from their cable TV network, not online ads. Unlike many of these smaller organizations ran by one or two people in the far-right, Fox News has a great deal of funding and doesn’t rely on their web content. But that doesn’t mean they’re not vulnerable.
If the ad campaign is successful, it could cut into Fox’s profits significantly. It could also spread. A company who takes their ads off Fox or away from an ad exchange that stays on Fox could decide to also take their business off of Fox’s cable network. As news of Fox’s online woes spread, other advertisers could pull their ads from network TV as well. Check My Ads and others have proof that Fox is engaging in racist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, and otherwise hateful behavior, while seemingly inciting and encouraging violence through its ongoing support of the coup attempt on January 6th and spread of misinformation that lead to that assault. How many companies would want their brand associated with that? Fox News will still have ads for pillows and chicken sandwiches, but they could lose advertising from everyone else. That starts with crippling their online ads and normalizing companies ditching Fox News ads.
Fight Back
You can take part. You can be part of the mission to finally take Fox News down or at least force it to stop spreading disinformation and encouraging violence through misleading, untrue, and vile hate speech. Between the coup attempt encouraged by distrust in elections, a shooting targeting Black people in Buffalo where the shooter paraphrased Fox News employee Tucker Carlson, and ongoing hateful attacks, Fox News has become a burden for our society. You can help stop them.
To start, it’s as easy as entering your email address on checkmyads.org. From there, you’ll receive occasional emails, about once or twice a week, with information on people to contact via email. This will give you a form letter you can copy and paste, with the email addresses to send it to. Don’t feel comfortable using your everyday email address? You can sign up for a free address in minutes on Gmail, Protonmail, or many others. You can also create email aliases, so you can easily filter incoming mail or simply turn off an email address in the future. Basically? There’s no danger in taking part of these actions. You can insulate your personal email inbox from correspondence related to the campaign in case you ever want to quit and stop receiving any correspondence from CheckMyAds or anyone else you reach out to.
Fighting back against the wave of alt-right violence plaguing our nation, even our world, has never been so easy.
Getting Started
- You can use your personal email account, it’s really not a big deal, but you could invite a lot of discussion you may not want to your main account. If you don’t want correspondence in your main inbox, create an email account on Gmail, Protonmail, or any other free email provider
- Alternatively: Just set up an email alias on your own account!
- Sign up on CheckMyAds.org
- Send emails when you get the forms
- If you ever want to leave the campaign, you can opt out on CheckMyAds.org. You can also then simply log out or delete the email/alias you created. It’s a fight you can easily step into and out of.
It’s that easy. In just a few minutes, you could start fighting back against misinformation and violence. If that’s your thing, get started with it today.
The fight against Fox News may be an extreme uphill battle for Check My Ads. It’s a fight worth having, as the largest and most popular cable news network holds a far-right bias with factual errors. Even Fox News has admitted in court that its programs shouldn’t be taken seriously. But to millions of viewers, they are. That disinformation and hate will only lead to violence and division, and it’s time to put a stop to it.
Sources:
- Bobby Allyn, NPR
- Check My Ads
- Media Matters Staff, Media Matters
- Madeline Peltz, Media Matters
- Sonam Sheth, Business Insider
- Shoshana Wodinsky, Gizmodo