Unfortunately, Marxists have become quite adept at manipulating the free market to destroy liberty.
The Dark Truth About “Brand Safety:” The Left’s Latest Mafia Shakedown Scam Against Free Speech
It’s a true censorship racket, with the same methods as the mafia original:
- Find a brand with ads on a “naughty” site — too right-wing, too vaxx-skeptical, too independent.
- Send “brand safety experts” to hector the company’s advertising department — “Gee, don’t you know you’re advertising on this naughty site? Do you really want your great brand appearing next to fake news and conspiracy theories?
- If it doesn’t submit right away, escalate to trashing them publicly.
- Have a side business offering businesses “guidance” on how to avoid this entire mess.
This is the shakedown operation by which “brand safety” experts intimidate and bully weak and cowardly advertisers from doing business with dozens of the most effective conservative sites.
It’s a gross scam. In real life, the only reason brands suffer at all is because these same left-wing activists harass them. Sometimes, it’s mafia profiteers like Nandini Jammi, and sometimes, it’s allies in the press generating non-news advocacy “journalism.”
Regular people simply don’t care about large companies having their ads algorithmically populate random sites. The artificial sense of outrage is always sparked by activists or extortionists. So if companies simply ignored the agitators entirely, the pain would go away. In fact, as one recent academic paper argues, just as submitting to a mafia protection racket only invites further extortion, playing the ad boycott game only invites further attacks from predatory leftists.
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Tom |
