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The BFD recently reported on the clandestine activities of the secretive group calling themselves “Paparoa”. As Juana Atkins wrote, “Like many fanatical groups, Paparoa sees itself as heroic, challenging hate while spying on others and collecting dossiers of information like modern-day Stasi”.
Well, as the late Christopher Hitchens warned, “every time you violate or propose to violate the free speech of someone else, in potencia, you’re making a rod for own back”. Left-wing blogger Caitlyn Johnstone has also railed against the left’s culture of censorship and repression, warning that it will come back to haunt them in the worst possible way.
Another secretive left-wing bully group, Sleeping Midgets Giants, is learning that very lesson. A tiny clique of bourgeois left-wing academics and spin doctors, Sleeping Bullies Giants use their hundreds of social media sock-puppets to bombard advertisers, with the aim of denying revenue to conservative outlets.
Though the group has a small social media following[…]it has succeeded in getting at least 20 major advertisers to abandon Tucker Carlson’s program on Fox News, and by some estimates it’s responsible for reducing the ad revenue at Breitbart.com by 90%.
Now, however, it seems that Sleeping Giants’ boycott campaigns, and others like it, are resulting in an unintended – but predictable — consequences.
They can’t say they weren’t warned. Their own shady, bully tactics have come back to bite their lefty pals right where it hurts – their pockets.
In the Internet era, advertisers have the luxury of being incredibly specific about what content they choose to advertise on. They do this by targeting content with “keywords” that identify news or content they want their ads to appear next to, or alternately identify content they don’t want to be associated with. And increasingly, advertisers are shying away from placement in any stories with controversial keywords, even when it means avoiding the biggest news of the day.
“What we never imagined was that brands would turn off the tap on all ‘NEWS & CURRENT EVENTS’ too.”
Can I have a sad trombone?
According to an article in The Guardian earlier this year, advertiser “blacklists are ballooning in some cases to as many as 3,000 or 4,000 words, blocking ads from many different stories,” and extensive keyword blacklists cost publications in the U.K. over $210 million in ad revenue last year.
Advertisers avoiding all controversial topics may well be devastating to journalism, an industry long beset by financial difficulties.
And now for some tiny violins.
What’s astonishing is that the co-founder of Sleeping Giants would be so clueless that she “never imagined” this would be the outcome of media boycotts.
Over a year ago, I wrote about Sleeping Giants and concluded that “boycotts are bad for a culture of free speech, but the biggest problem might be that they establish a baseline where corporate policies define the terms of political debate.” And that point was obvious long before I made it[…]
Sleeping Giants kicked one of the biggest own goals in modern journalism. In trying to silence conservatives, they turned loose a beast which resolutely refuses to distinguish between these bullies’ friends or foes.
It’s a lesson Paparoa might want to think about while they’re anonymously snitching and spying. As countless Soviet commissars learned the hard way, repression is a two-edged sword. Today’s informant is tomorrow’s purged “counter-revolutionary”.
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