Social media pressure is here to stay as a tactic against advertisers and platforms that support shows like Infowars, because it works, as Sleeping Giants shows
Shortly before the 2016 presidential election, Matt Rivitz stumbled upon the Breitbart News website, which once called itself the “home of the alt-right.” Tweets: @chuq , @sulliview , and @slpng_giants See also Mediagazer Tweets: Chuq Von Rospach / @chuq : Considering companies/groups use that pressure/influence of twitter to accomplish their own goals, why are they surprised when others apply it to them? http://twitter.com/... Margaret Sullivan / @sulliview : Perspective | Online activists hit hatemongers like Alex Jones where it hurts the most — in the wallet. ... My column on @slpng_giants http://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Sleeping Giants / @slpng_giants : Hey, it's Matt here. More than flattered to have @Sulliview write a column about what we're doing with @slpng_giants for the @washingtonpost. She's as cool as advertised. Just wish they had used a more flattering photo of me. http://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Two days before this column ran, Mark Zuckerberg made the call to take Infowars down — a decision he only settled on after seeing Apple remove the Infowars podcasts, which is itself evidence of the article's thesis: advertiser and platform pressure moves in a herd, and one company's removal lowers the cost for the next. Sleeping Giants, founded by Matt Rivitz, had spent two years demonstrating that a Twitter account tagging brands next to screenshots of Breitbart and Infowars content reliably pulls ad spend.
The tactic's success is also its vulnerability. The same playbook of coordinated, inauthentic-seeming amplification shows up on the right — The Daily Wire's promotion through 14 Facebook pages is one documented mirror — and the pressure eventually turned inward on Sleeping Giants itself, with [[a:Nandini Jammi's exit over co-founder Matt Rivitz|955551]] exposing how thin the group's own governance was.
First-order effects
- Advertisers on shows like Infowars face immediate brand-safety tagging on Twitter, making continued ad placement a public liability rather than a private media buy.
- Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are pushed toward removal decisions they had deferred, with Zuckerberg's Infowars takedown showing the cascade effect once Apple and other gatekeepers moved first.
Second-order effects
- Right-wing media operations adopt mirror-image tactics — coordinated page networks promoting outlets like The Daily Wire — turning advertiser pressure from a one-sided boycott into an arms race of grassroots-looking campaigns.
- Platforms respond by placating hyperpartisan critics on both sides rather than setting consistent policy, the 'working the refs' dynamic that later coverage of Facebook, Google, and Twitter documents.
Third-order effects
- Content moderation on major platforms becomes increasingly set by advertiser risk exposure and peer-platform cascades rather than by stated policy, with each high-profile ban (and the migration of banned figures to secondary accounts) eroding the deterrent value of removals.
- Organized social media pressure hardens into a permanent, bidirectional enforcement layer over the ad economy — one that activist groups themselves must survive, as Sleeping Giants' own internal split shows.
The trend: Advertiser-boycott campaigns are becoming a de facto moderation mechanism on social platforms, with both political wings and the platforms themselves now operating inside that pressure system.