“We got Yahoo to kill their Glenn Beck ads,” Nandini Jammi announced during a private video call in February with two colleagues from the group Check My Ads and 20-odd supporters. “I’m sorry — I’m using very violent language — to block Glenn Beck from their inventory.”
On the screen, a row of faces nodded. They knew Jammi was referring to Yahoo Ad Tech, a part of the web pioneer Yahoo, Inc., that places ads for thousands of other companies on sites across the web but, she said, had just stopped placing them on The Blaze, which was started by Beck. Yahoo had provided almost “instant gratification,” Jammi added, acting within 12 hours of receiving emailed complaints that Blaze TV had promoted “voter fraud claims” and that two days before a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, Beck had said on his brodacast: “It is time to fight. It is time to rip and claw and rake. It is time to go to war, as the left went to war four years ago.”
Beck had not called for attacks on the Capitol, and a day later he told people planning to march in Washington, D.C., to “channel your inner Martin Luther King,” but his first remarks had violated Yahoo’s community guidelines that prohibit content promoting “domestic violent extremism,” according to emails Jammi and others had sent to executives at the company. They did not reply, Jammi said, but she had gotten a sympathetic message from one of their employees: “There was someone from Yahoo in my DMs on LinkedIn who was like, ‘I completely support everything you do.’”
Jammi, a former marketing manager, helped pioneer a form of activism that has removed millions of dollars in ad revenue from websites she accused of spreading disinformation. She and her institute are major players in the burgeoning — and to some controversial — industry devoted to fighting falsehoods that exploded after Donald Trump rode a wave of lies to victory in 2016. (Jammi and her colleague Claire Atkin sit on the advisory committee of Good Information, Inc., a group the billionaires Reid Hoffman and George Soros helped start and that finances efforts to fight online disinformation.)
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Source: The Defunders