Sleeping Giants

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In November 2016 a new form of online anti-hate activism was born. Instead of responding to hateful content or its authors at all, these counterspeakers came up with a new, indirect, and quite effective method that is still in regular use, more than a decade later. They contacted companies whose advertisements were appearing alongside hateful content, and warned them that it was bad for their brands. The idea was to withdraw funding for hatred.

“Are you aware that you’re advertising on Breitbart, the alt-right’s biggest champion, today?” read the first tweet from the new group, called Sleeping Giants. Within half an hour, the CEO of the company replied to say it would pull its ads from Breitbart News. Within a few months, Sleeping Giants had more than 200,000 followers and it had driven hundreds of companies off Breitbart, where flagrant racism, sexism, and xenophobia flourished openly.

Matt Rivitz, a founder of Sleeping Giants, said he dreamed up that name because he wanted something that would sound big - “bigger than just me.” An advertising copywriter, he “couldn’t believe big corporations… were supporting this site that was openly disparaging immigrants and women and the black community.” Companies generally didn’t know where their ads were appearing online, though, due to a system called programmatic advertising, in which they buy ads in auctions, bidding for who will see their ads (consumers from particular demographic groups) not where they will appear.

But, Rivitz said, “To me it’s: racism needs to be confronted. I was always the person who would confront his friends if they would say something.” So Sleeping Giants began to close the knowledge gap—showing advertisers pictures of their brand next to content that they might find objectionable and would not want to be seen as endorsing. For example, one Giant tweeted at Qatar Islamic Bank noting that its ad featuring a woman in a hijab appeared on a Breitbart page with a quote saying hijabs should never be seen on American women.

The group instructed advertisers on how to remove Breitbart and other sites from their ad buys (ad brokers allow companies to maintain “blacklists” of sites where they don’t want their ads to appear), and praised them for doing so. When an advertiser blocked Breitbart News from their ad buy, for instance, Sleeping Giants sent out a congratulatory tweet praising the advertiser.

Sleeping Giants has had significant impact: thousands of companies have pulled ads in response to requests from the “Giants,” including 4,292 companies that bowed out of Breitbart News. The Giants have gone after other major purveyors of hateful lies and disinformation online, including Alex Jones, who notoriously claimed that the massacre of 20 small children and six adults in a school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, was a hoax. They are now working on a campaign against the television network Fox News, called Dump Fox.

Nandini Jammi, another of the founders of Sleeping Giants, attributes its success in part to the lighthearted tone that Giants used - different from the dark image of angry protestors that she chose for an early Tumblr account that the Giants didn’t end up using. “We were funny and irreverent and it was still assertive and it came with a strong point of view and it was fun to hang out in our mentions.. So we kind of built a culture around that.”

Some commentators have said Sleeping Giants simply organizes boycotts, and therefore hasn’t developed a new method of anti-hate activism. We (at the DSP) believe it is different from boycotts because of its method of informing companies where their ads appear. It is also a form of online counterspeech, since it is a direct response to hatred, meant to undermine it. As a group of academics who studied the Sleeping Giants branch in Brazil put it, “the Sleeping Giants movement brings something unique to the table: a clearly defined “activism model” that has been replicated across the globe and, unlike many, has an objective that is clear and verifiable.” (Gomes Ribeiro et al, 2022)

The model has been replicated in at least 11 other countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, and France, which all have Sleeping Giants chapters, some of which have been notably successful and influential. The only other counterspeech effort we know of that has migrated so many countries is #iamhere.

The Brazilian account began in May 2020, after the Spanish newspaper El Pais published an article about Sleeping Giants in its Brazil edition. Matt Rivitz recalled that by the next morning, several Sleeping Giants Brazil accounts had already been created by different eager Brazilians. He contacted them and then there was just one account, run by law students, that took off so quickly that it soon had 400,000 followers - about double the number of the original Sleeping Giants account in the United States.

“Practically all members of the movement joined the cause for being unhappy with the way the dangerous speeches ignited and radicalized their own families,” the founders of that account told us. “It is something we have in common: family members radicalized by mass manipulation and that is certainly what motivated each of us.”

They started - on May 18, 2020 - by trying to convince advertisers to withdraw from Jornal da Cidade Online, a notorious vehicle for disinformation. They went on to target other similar sites. They were highly successful, as researchers have documented, in getting responses from companies, and Sleeping Giants Brazil (SGB) leadership told us in an interview that they also felt they had created a new culture of brand awareness related to advertising among companies in Brazil. Finally, SGB roiled the Brazilian government by documenting ads on Jornal da Cidade from the Banco do Brasil, which is the oldest bank in Brazil, the largest financial institution in Latin America, and whose majority stockholder is the federal government of Brazil. A Brazilian court ordered the government to stop buying ads via Google AdSense, a programmatic advertising market.

Researchers who studied SGB’s efforts drew mixed conclusions: on the one hand, 89.82% of companies reacted to SGB’s requests, and usually took down their ads. On the other hand, traffic to the sites SGB targeted didn’t go down much. This is in keeping with Matt Rivitz’s comment about the people whose sites he targets, “I think they have every right to make that website. They don’t have the right to $8 million in advertising.”

The French Sleeping Giants account, which has over 47,000 followers, has also engaged in activism beyond calling out individual ads to the companies that paid for them. It succeeded in lobbying for a new anti-hatred law in France that contains a requirement for companies to report their site lists (the list of all the sites where their ads are being shown) each month. The law passed on January 22, 2020, and has become known as the “sleeping giants amendment.”

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