How to Defund Fox News

There is a new group that is trying to defund disinformation online. They've already had a couple of successes with right-wing websites, and now they are targeting Fox News. The group is called Check My Ads. It was founded by Claire Atkin. In addition to the founder of this group, she is a longtime brand safety advocate and consultant, and she joins us now. Claire, first of all, tell us a little bit about this campaign. Why Fox News? Why now? Hi, thanks for having me, and thanks for your interest in Check My Ads, which I co-founded with my co-founder Nandini Jami. We are the brand safety advocate and an ad tech watchdog. So advertisers the world over have said they don't want to fund disinformation and hate speech. And what we do is we uncover when ad exchanges, the middlemen who actually place the ads, are working with disinformation and hate speech and sending ads to them against the advertiser's wishes. So the advertisers in a lot of these cases, they simply say, okay, we're gonna use this middleman, place us where you think our ads are gonna be effective without any sort of knowledge of what they do with the advertisements, is that correct? Yes, ad exchanges say to advertisers, don't worry, we'll send your ads around the Internet, but we will make sure to keep your ads away from the promotion of real world violence, for instance, or election disinformation. And then they turn around and they work with people like Charlie Kirk or Glenn Beck, Dan Bongino, Steve Bannon. These are all people who we have successfully defunded by uncovering the relationship between ad exchanges and these websites. And now we're asking, how is Fox News any different? Well how did you do it with Steve Bannon and Dan Bongino and some of those groups? I mean, how do you essentially try to stop and bring awareness, not only to the advertisers, but also put the middlemen on notice? What we do is we tweet and we email the ad exchanges and we compare their tech policies, their supply chain policies. Basically, they say, we will never work with publishers who spread election disinformation. And we compare that against the real world impacts of the disinformation outlets. And over and over again, these ad exchanges choose to drop the disinformation outlets because it's not good for their clients. We don't pressure the advertisers because the advertisers have already been clear. We're here to talk about the ad exchanges. And so the ad exchanges, it sounds like they've been pretty responsive so far. Yes, so far, five of the six insurrectionists that we identified when we launched this campaign on January 5th have been mostly defunded. That is, they have lost the ad exchanges that give them the ads and the money that they need to survive. And now we're saying, Fox News is the biggest promoter of the insurrection. So how are they any different? Why are they still there getting a hall pass? Now, is it possible this could just turn into sort of a whack-a-mole that if the ad exchanges realize, okay, well, we don't wanna do business with Fox News or we don't wanna do business with Steve Bannon, that there'll be some sort of right wing advertising exchange that will come into place and say, okay, well, we'll take this business and we'll figure out products that are willing to go ahead and advertise with Steve Bannon or Fox News. Absolutely, and we would welcome that in the market. We think that advertisers should have the right to choose where their ads end up. And what we're arguing for is transparency and accountability on what's called the digital supply chain. And we think that if there is accountability and transparency, that's just fine. Claire, what's been the reaction from these various groups, whether it's the middleman, whether it's the advertisers, whether it's the platforms like Fox News? What are they saying about this? Well, it's been really interesting because they have been so responsive about Charlie Kirk. We launched this campaign January 5th. On January 6th, Charlie Kirk was dropped from their ad exchange, Playwire. And Steve Bannon, Dan Bongino, they've been dropped from Google ads even. And they've been totally silent in the last two weeks when we've talked about Fox News. So we're waiting to hear from the ad exchanges and we would encourage anyone to ask what is up with them. We have about 40,000 people who have signed up to send emails to ad exchanges. with us. And if you also want to make a statement, if you also want to question ad exchanges with us, you can go to checkmyads.org slash Fox. And that's where you can give us your email and we'll send you action emails with the names of executives, their email addresses, and templates of the message that says your supply policy says this, but you're working with an outlet that does the exact opposite. And that's what we're doing right now. It's a pressure campaign. And the pressure campaign, there's been some criticism from sort of more smaller outlets who say, look, when you go after a Fox News, when you're drying up advertising dollars for them, it also makes it more difficult for smaller outlets, independent journalists, independent programs to get advertising. Because if it's quote unquote public affairs of any kind, Fox News or anything else, you've made advertisers skittish. What's your response to that? Yeah, the brand safety industry has done an incredibly poor job understanding this issue. And what they've done is they've actually tried to scare advertisers away from any news that is controversial. And we at Check My Ads are extremely against that statement, because we're here for democracy. We think that the news should be where advertisers are. I mean, for one thing, that's where the readers are. And to scare advertisers away from working with real journalism is the exact opposite message. We're talking about disinformation versus journalistic standards. There's no need to stay away from the news. Is there something different about the online advertising exchanges as opposed to say, Tucker Carlson on the Fox News cable show? He can spew all kinds of stuff and there'll be certain advertisers who still wanna reach his audience. Does that change when the clips from Tucker Carlson or another show then get posted digitally on the Fox News YouTube channel? Yes, there are a few advertisers who choose to be on Fox News on cable. And to those advertisers, we say you have a right to do that, we leave them alone. But there are so many hundreds and hundreds of advertisers who are on foxnews.com inadvertently, who have said we want brand safety standards and who expect brand safety standards who are there inadvertently. And we're really fighting for transparency for them. Now, the other thing is that cable news is only valuable as an outlet. But when you're on the digital supply chain, when you're connected to the Internet programmatic ads, you get ads which give legitimacy. You get data which helps you better target your audience members. It's an incredibly useful tool when you're a propaganda outlet to be associated with these ad exchanges. When we cut them off, we're not just cutting them off from money, we're cutting them off from the propaganda tool. And also the demographic information, it's so interesting because if I suppose I like to go and look at baseball websites, then suddenly a lot of baseball related ads or tickets to the Yankees or whatnot pop up on my various websites. I would imagine that if you then somehow were able to figure out, well, here are the advertisers that are popping up on foxnews.com and suddenly they're not gonna be able to get the information of who's visiting foxnews.com. That seems to throw a monkey wrench in the industry. That's exactly right. I mean, this is a time, the congressional hearings are so moving on the television every day. And we're waiting for the people who promoted the insurrection, people who started the insurrection, the big lie to be held accountable. And what I'm really excited about with this campaign is this is an opportunity for everyone, all of us, all consumers to have our voices heard. And when we advocate for transparency on the supply chain, we're not infringing on anyone's rights. If anything, we're saying advertisers should have the choice of whether or not to fund disinformation. And those advertisers, are they aware? I mean, look, I can think of lots of products, whether it's flowers or chocolate or various. Omaha Steaks is a popular one with some podcasts that I've done, where it seems like they just wanna have their product out there. Are they aware of the control, the opportunity that they as products have in terms of deciding, hey, I'm willing to be on this kind of site, but I don't wanna be on a disinformation site. The most important thing to remember about the digital supply chain, what we're talking about, the ad tech industry, is that ad exchanges have taken control away from advertisers for decades now. And a lot of the time, they don't know where they are. And they don't know the metrics of their own campaigns at above or below the high level reports that they get from these ad exchanges. So we're talking about an industry, this is like a 400 to $700 billion industry, with a handful of ad exchanges who really control. They're like the traffic controllers of ads, money, and data. This is not as a place where advertisers have a lot of control. So we have to uncover the ad exchanges and say, what are you doing? So if I'm, let's say, suppose I'm selling flowers, and I wanna advertise my flowers in places where people are gonna buy it. Can I now go, is it as simple as going to various advertising agencies and saying, hey, I don't wanna be on Fox News, or I don't wanna be on Steve Bannon, and are they very responsive? Or is it more complicated in terms of if you've got a product and you wanna limit where that product goes? Most of the time, it's the right thing to do and all you can do to say, this is the brand safety guidelines that I have. Do not send my ads to places that promote real world violence, that includes insurrections. And what we're finding is that actually advertisers are being lied to. And so what we're pressuring ad exchanges to do is good business. And that's really what this is about. If you're selling flowers, I think that you should be able to control where your ads are going. But the fact is, is on this giant industry, the ad exchanges are not doing what is right by their clients. And that's really what we're here to uncover. Are there any standards that the industry has created for themselves, or is this essentially the Wild West? It's a bit of a mix, honestly. The ad exchanges and the websites themselves both report about who they work for. But at Check My Ads, we find discrepancies all the time in that information. And we are constantly uncovering where these standards are just not upheld. Are there any products that say, I don't care, I wanna be on foxnews.com, or even if they're spreading disinformation, whatever you call it, I'm happy to be there. Any products like that? Yeah, sure, and we would support their right to do that, just as we support the right of Fox News to publish whatever they want. We just think that there should be transparency and control on the part of the advertisers and the ad exchanges within this economy. Yeah, because as a consumer, I wanna know, okay, which products are willingly advertising on foxnews.com, so I can make a conscious decision. I'm not gonna buy your products, I'm not gonna give you a dime. And I feel like the transparency helps not only the advertisers, but also the consumers with the choices that we're making. Claire Atkin, the group is called Check My Ads. It's a new campaign trying to defund the advertisements for foxnews.com. They've already had some successes with other groups. Claire, thanks for doing this and explaining it to us. We appreciate it. Thank you for having me.