More than 20 advertisers remove ads from Breitbart News
More than 20 advertisers, including Kellogg, US Bank and Warby Parker have removed ads from the controversial and right-wing news outlet Breitbart, according to the Twitter campaign Sleeping Giants, which notifies companies their brand advertisements are appearing on the site through third-party exchanges. Breitbart, accused of publishing racist, misogynistic and homophobic content, responded with a vitriolic editorial calling for a boycott of Kellogg, using the hashtag #WAR. Advertisers are often unaware of where their ads are placed, due to programmatic advertising. Last week, AppNexus announced that it had banned Breitbart from its ad exchange for alleged hate speech.
Several major brands are scrubbing their ads from far-right news outlet Breitbart following pressure from social media users.

A makeshift campaign at the center of the boycott effort called Sleeping Giants claims(opens in a new tab) that more than 20 advertisers have either publicly or privately agreed to remove ads from the site, including Kellogg, U.S. Bank and Warby Parker.

SEE ALSO: Major ad tech platform shuts out Breitbart for hate speech

Their decisions come amid renewed backlash against the site prompted by Donald Trump's recent appointment of Breitbart chairman Stephen Bannon as his chief strategist. Critics say the agitative outlet frequently traffics in racist, misogynist and homophobic content.

Kellogg, the most notable advertiser to join the fray, said in a statement this week that Breitbart isn't "aligned with [its] values as a company."

"We learned from consumers that ads were placed on Breitbart.com and decided to discontinue advertising there," a spokesperson said.

That pronouncement caused particular consternation from Breitbart, which breathlessly denounced(opens in a new tab) the cereal maker "un-American" and called for a boycott of its products in a post on Wednesday. As of that afternoon, the hashtag #DumpKelloggs had climbed its way into the top Twitter trends in the United States.

Mashable contacted many of the other brands named by the campaign to confirm the removal and will update this post once they respond.

The exodus follows last week's news that AppNexus, one of the biggest advertising platforms on the web, has banned Breitbart from its ad service for alleged hate speech.

The man behind the campaign, who declined to be named for fear of harassment, said he started the effort around two weeks ago with the intent of boycotting advertisers that appeared on Breitbart.

But he quickly found that because of the way third-party networks and automated ad exchanges work, many of these companies had no idea their ads were on the site. The campaign then became more about notifying the marketers of the placements.

He says the impetus went beyond left and right politics; it's about condemning content that is blatantly hateful or has the potential to incite violence or harassment.

Shannon Coulter, who maintains a widely cited list(opens in a new tab) of companies that do business with Trump brands called #GrabYourWallet, also helped promote the effort among her follower base.

A few advertisers have announced their participation on Twitter.

Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alexander Marlow called Kellogg's decision an "act of discrimination and intense prejudice" in a vitriolic statement(opens in a new tab) posted to the site.

"They insult our incredibly diverse staff and spit in the face of our 45,000,000 highly engaged, highly perceptive, highly loyal readers, many of whom are Kellogg’s customers," Marlow said.

However, some have noted the campaign's resemblance to a similar effort(opens in a new tab) Breitbart co-signed against now-defunct Gawker after the site insulted the so-called #GamerGate movement.

Caught unaware

The lack of awareness among brands speaks to a broader problem with programatic ads -- those placed automatically by software -- in general. That is, digital advertisers oftentimes don't have much control over the sites where their ads might surface. Even specified blacklists of sites to avoid don't always work, as Digiday notes(opens in a new tab).

While big purveyors of this sort of advertising, like Google and AppNexus, maintain quality standards that exclude things like pornography, gambling, piracy and hate speech, controversial sites or content that clashes with brand values are another matter.

Google's AdSense ad network has declined to comment when asked if it plans to bar Breitbart from the service.

This blindspot may become more prominent as media attention turns to the host of fake new, hate speech and propaganda sites that enjoy floods of traffic from online platforms.