15 ms·

Breitbart news site blocked by ad exchange

aggronn 10y ago
Worth noting this is Appnexus, not Google AdExchange. Appnexus is still a very large ad exchange, but Breitbart's business shouldn't necessarily be affected. Its not unlikely that Appnexus and Breitbart don't even have a direct relationship, and Appnexus is just going to block bids on that domain.
mzw_mzw 10y ago
Boycotting, ostracizing and shaming them didn't work the last fifty times, but it's bound to work this time!
- misnome 10y ago
  What do you suggest instead?
- mhurron 10y ago
  So you just pay people you fundamentally disagree with? Not every boycott is undertaken to change things, they can also be done simply to have nothing to do with what the target is doing.
- exit 10y ago
  it maybe be a necessary if not sufficient condition
- yedava 10y ago
  I don't think anyone is under the illusion that Breitbart can be boycotted or shamed. The market they cater to lives in a pretty air-tight bubble, the same bubble which sustains Fox News/Drudge Report/Rush Limbaugh etc....
  - nerfhammer 10y ago
    Clickbait becomes pointless if all the ad networks ban them
  - pyronik 10y ago
    You say this like the left doesn't have its own in the NYT, CNN, ABC, NBC, Huff, Salon, etc... that's much more of an bubbled echo chamber. At least on the right they get bombarded with MSM daily... they just know its straight up corrupt.
    - yedava 10y ago
      The left has its own biases, but to equate it with the Fox News/Breitbart bubble is dishonest. To take science as an example, the left has its own set of denialists (ex: anti-vaccers, anti-GMO), but the left has plenty of people who push back against such science denialism. The Fox News/Breitbart bubble doesn't have any such checking mechanism. There's a reason why creationism is popular in the US.
- tobltobs 10y ago
  It hasn't anything to do with Boycotting. It is just that some advertisers don't wanna pay to have their adverts shown next to those gross discussions.
  - geekamongus 10y ago
    This is probably the most important point to consider about this situation.
  - dhimes 10y ago
    This. I simply cannot have my ads on this type of site. So I will seek and pay for ad networks that guarantee that my ads don't appear there. This is simply the free market.
- roywiggins 10y ago
  It's possible that it actually has worked, and things would be even worse without.
  - striking 10y ago
    It's a reference to Trump's presidency, and how some people think it was brought on by left-leaning journalists.
infinity0 10y ago
Responding to them with good arguments instead of repeating pseudo-sociological abstract bullshit? edit: looks like some prick is going through and systematically downvoting my posts. Go fuck yourself, you are the reason why Trump got elected. In reply to knz, I hope you see the illogicality of interpreting what I wrote above as "suggesting any argument [I] disagree with is [...]". Passing off the whole of the "alt-right" as "irrational" is exactly the sort of attitude that encourages previously-neutral people to leave social and progressive political groups. Unless you have a mathematical proof of this statement, I would be more humble in what one chooses to believe, and how one conducts one's arguments.
- eli 10y ago
  You want their ad network to argue with them?
  - infinity0 10y ago
    Are you even trying to understand what other people say, or trying to sound good by attacking straw men?
    - eli 10y ago
      Sorry if that was too snarky. I guess my point is there obviously isn't one correct tactic. The people who run ad tech (or any other) businesses have a very binary decision: either they allow someone to be a customer or they don't.
- yedava 10y ago
  Just today Brietbart published articles pushing climate change denial and brigading Amazon reviews of a book because the said author disagrees with Donald Trump. How does one reason with such an obstinate worldview?
  - Zenst 10y ago
    Well for me the way to deal with the whole "climate change" is wrong, if they were to say - "who wants cleaner air and water" - Nobody would argue and things would just move forward and avoid getting hung up on debate and endless papers and research to spell out the common sense. It is like arguing the compass direction to the nearest degree when if you said is the general wind N,S,E or west then everybody would agree it's just one of those and things would move in the right general direction instead of doing circles for years upon years, whilst time waits for nobody. In short, its how you define the issue in a way that everybody can relate too better and if that means going indirectly with the side-effect being the target, then so be it.
Kenji 10y ago
When will the liberals learn? Silencing only fuels this movement. Silencing is the path of least intellectual integrity. Don't they realize that every time they ban or block the alt-right, instead of refuting their arguments, the alt-right wins? People aren't that stupid, you can't just block the alt-right talking points out of their sight and thus out of their mind. Same thing with 'fake news'. The notion of 'hate speech' has been used so broadly that it is now inflated to complete meaninglessness.
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  Studies have shown that arguing with extremists makes them more resolute. Also not doing business with them isn't silencing them they are just as free to pursue their mission tomorrow as today.
  - CydeWeys 10y ago
    The embargo on South Africa in protest of apartheid worked. I don't see why something similar wouldn't work here. Breitbart is first and foremost a business, and they have lots of employees on staff pushing these messages of hate that need to be paid. If their income stream dries up it makes it much harder to continue doing what they're doing.
    - gspetr 10y ago
      Small sample might be at fault here. For a counterexample: has the embargo on Iran worked?
  - Kenji 10y ago
    Studies have shown that if you call someone you disagree with an extremist, fruitful conversation is extremely unlikely to happen.
- tobltobs 10y ago
  Not wasting customers marketing budgets == Silencing ?
- 10y ago
javery 10y ago
The world we are moving to is one where ad exchanges, google, and facebook get to decide what can survive on the web. This doesn't seem like a good thing.
- bitwize 10y ago
  Unfortunately for the USA, we can't quash hate with the law, but we still can use social means.
  - Amezarak 10y ago
    Who gets to decide what 'hate' is? Breitbart claims it isn't: Breitbart responded saying it "has always and continues to condemn racism and bigotry in any form". The exchange refuses to say what triggered their action: "We use a number of third-party standards to determine what is and isn't hate speech, and if we detect a pattern of speech that could incite violence or discrimination against a minority group, we determine that to be non-compliant and we simply won't serve ads against it," AppNexus's spokesman Joshua Zeitz told the BBC. "I'm not going to put the examples out there because I'm not going to engage in a tit-for-tat on what is compliant." The article lists some headlines that they consider somewhat questionable, but you can easily google similar headlines focused on other groups from sites like the Huffington Post; e.g. "White People Are Too Dumb to Know They're Racist". Do you think we will see similar action taken against those such sites? Breitbart got its big start, I believe, from the atrocious hoaxes itperpetrated on ACORN, NPR, and other organizations to destroy their reputations unfairly. It has come a long way; it's now simply a very biased news organization that sometimes does decent reporting on undercovered topics. Yes, it is every ad network's right to refuse to associate with Breitbart or anyone else for that matter. But is this really the direction we, as a society, want to move in? Do we want ad networks taking activist stances about news websites? Do we want everyone to have to pick a side? Do we want people's careers destroyed for holding relatively mainstream opinions that happen to contradict the majority opinion?
    - Bud 10y ago
      >Yes, it is every ad network's right to refuse to associate with Breitbart or anyone else for that matter. But is this really the direction we, as a society, want to move in? Yes, this is the direction we as a society want to move in. The opposite direction from hate speech. A direction in which large commercial ad enterprises do not support neo-Nazi content and do not support neo-Nazis making a lot of money off said content; at least not on AppNexus' dime. This is precisely the direction we want to move in.
cloakandswagger 10y ago
Headlines like this along with the MSM's latest push to define "fake news" is pretty worrisome. Even if you don't agree with Breitbart or other outlets, it's frightening to think we could soon be in a world where entire stories are categorically dismissed or accepted based on their source, rather than their individual content.
- um_ya 10y ago
  The precursors of the "ministry of truth"
  - acchow 10y ago
    Long time since I read the book, but did the precursors of the "ministry of truth" really start in corporations?
    - elcct 10y ago
      They figured out that using communism to steal from the people is not effective so they invented social democracy to steal via government fenced corporations. This gives people more sense of freedom whilst generating better yield for the ruling class.
      - icebraining 10y ago
        I'm pretty sure none of that is in the book.
  - rconti 10y ago
    If anything, the precursor to the ministry of truth is a political figure making it clearer than ever that coverage he doesn't like will be severely punished. Not just by loss of access, but by lawsuits and changes to the law. It's hardly new that news organizations have to be a bit friendly to anyone they cover in order to preserve access. I cannot waltz into the White House press room and expect equal access, no matter how fair and intelligent my non-existent media empire is. But the scope and severity we have been promised is an order of magnitude worse.
tenpies 10y ago
> AppNexus has not given examples. > But a spokesman said a "human audit" of Breitbart had flagged several articles that had caused it concern because of the language they had featured. I'm not even a Breitbart reader but this strikes me as a ridiculously dangerous standard to use. "Human audit" is also my new favourite term for forming an opinion.
- Bud 10y ago
  This is not dangerous in any way. This is not a free speech issue. Commercial enterprises are entirely free to support business activity that they agree with, and refuse to support activity that they do not agree with. For those who are improperly conflating this issue with free speech or First Amendment rights in any way, you probably need a reminder: https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/
  - FoxHound56 10y ago
    It is not legally a free speech issue. Sure. But it is in fact very, very dangerous. The amount of power that huge tech companies such as Google and Facebook have over people these days is not very far off from the power a government has over people. If they are using that power to silence people they disagree with then that is extremely dangerous. Even if you happen to agree with them this time, you might not in the future. The fact that they are not a government is irrelevant to how dangerous these actions are, considering they have the power to silence millions of people. It is not in any meaningful way comparable to a restaurant owner showing you the door, considering the scale of these networks.
  - striking 10y ago
    History suggests otherwise, and so does the SCOTUS and ACLU. http://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/ http://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/
- smsm42 10y ago
  But you see, if you call it "my personal opinion", it sounds small and unimportant, but if you call it "human audit", it sounds like a cutting-age scientific technology to evaluate content. So it's clear which one should be chosen.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
MandieD 10y ago
Market forces at work...
zelon88 10y ago
With authors like Milo Yiannopoulos posting articles like "Why There Ought to Be a Cap on Women Studying Science and Maths" I would say they dug their own grave. If we really have to explain or justify why this is bad journalism maybe it shouldn't be considered journalism at all. I'm ok with that, but there should be open discussion and some methodology behind the future of journalistic classification.
- rwmj 10y ago
  It's really trolling, but it presents itself using the trappings of journalism which has a few benefits over old-fashioned trolling: First some people believe things which are presented in a certain way, through a "news site" etc. Secondly claiming to be a journalist provides some legal defences. There are examples of this in the UK too: Katie Hopkins is a master troll pretending to be a journalist (and with a column in a tabloid newspaper too).
- ronnier 10y ago
  This is the article mentioned above http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/15/heres-why-there-ought-to-be-a-cap-on-women-studying-science-and-maths/ http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/15/heres-why...
- idetectit 10y ago
  Hi, I find your comment problematic for two reasons. 1) If you replaced "women" with "men" in that title, I'm sure you'd have no problem with it. In fact, no doubt you'd probably gleefully Facebook it to all your tweet snapchatters on Instagram. and 2) Milo is a homosexual. You speak from a position of straight white male privilege and as such you are in no position to judge his journalistic skills or even question if it should be considered journalism at all. It sounds like what you really want is to only classify "journalism" as "stuff written by privileged straight white athiestic males and females with a liberal bent".
  - zelon88 10y ago
    I don't believe there should be a cap on anyone's education; male, female, or otherwise. I also don't think that Milo is qualified to define what the word "journalism" means any more than I am. I can write opinions on a blog or onto a piece of paper. That doesn't make my work "journalism." Neither does declaring that I'm a journalist or declaring that my work is journalism. Also, sexual orientation doesn't give Milo a free pass to write click-bait and pass it off as journalism. It also doesn't excuse him from saying misogynistic things. I will respect Milo's right to say what he wants. That's it.
spoiledtechie 10y ago
This is quite frankly bad. Even the spokesman said he wasn't going to get into it (because it might hurt the PC police). It truly seems like there is a political backlash war going on. It seems so childish, but they are only trying to hurt Breitbarts bottom line. We are becoming even more divided.
- vorotato 10y ago
  Demographically speaking the major "divide", is by age. All we have to do it wait 30 years and the divide will be over.
  - tropo 10y ago
    In those 30 years, many young liberals will turn into old conservatives. New liberals will be born to replace the ones who became conservatives. This divide isn't going anywhere.
    - internaut 10y ago
      That isn't a universal pattern. The generation after millennials is more conservative. You should look up the statistics for political affiliation of Israeli youth. With my generation I am far right. Among the younger generation I'm the moderate.
datenheini 10y ago
Facebook wants no nipples, AppNexus wants no alt-right. Their house, their rules.
btilly 10y ago
As long as Breitbart has a large audience that advertisers wish to sell things to, economic pressure will lead them to advertise there. If this particular ad network won't, then they will find one that will. Therefore this will not hurt Breitbart.
wcummings 10y ago
>"Breitbart is the most pro-Israel site in the United States of America," he added. If you define "pro-Israel" as "anti-Arab", maybe.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
venantius 10y ago
I see a lot of concerns about censorship here. One of the things that isn't really being talked about is the fact that Facebook, Google etc. are directly responsible for these organizations being promoted in the first place. Absent these content aggregators, Breitbart might never have had a significant following in the first place. In that context, them taking actions to lower its priority in various ways bothers me a lot less.
yladiz 10y ago
I see little wrong with this. I understand the idea that it's not necessarily right that ad companies stop supporting something based on ill-defined criteria, and I do support the idea that the criteria should be well defined. In this case, I think the criteria is pretty well defined: "pattern of speech that could incite violence or discrimination against a minority group." Although the site says that they, "have always and continue to condemn racism and bigotry in any form," their actions, in this case articles like, "Why There Ought to Be a Cap on Women Studying Science and Maths"[1], doesn't reflect that message and this in particular is discriminatory against women. There are other examples in the BBC article as well. The BBC article also mentions that the articles in question were written by a guest author, not a staff member, but the onus on posting something on the website falls on the staff, so that argument falls flat. The other and simpler reality is that they are a private company that can do what they want when it comes to how they utilize their resources. If they don't want to serve ads on Breitbart then it's their choice. Even if they just arbitrarily chose to disallow Breitbart on their platform, it might be unjust but it's their right and choice. On a more philosophical note, consider that all these issues of "fake news losing ad revenue" and the one mentioned here are generally only possible because the media is very free to post whatever they want and get paid for it, thanks to the USA's extremely free media laws. It isn't ideal for sure, but in some respects I'd rather have this reality where we worry about a specific news organization losing ad revenue than the reality where the only news that I can read is state sponsored. 1: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/15/heres-why-there-ought-to-be-a-cap-on-women-studying-science-and-maths/ http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/15/heres-why...
smsm42 10y ago
Well, AppNexus is certainly free to act out their ideological biases. I'm pretty sure there are more than one ad networks, including ones which don't make agreeing with network's management on political matters a prerequisite for doing business with them, and Breibart would be completely fine.

Worth noting this is Appnexus, not Google AdExchange. Appnexus is still a very large ad exchange, but Breitbart's business shouldn't necessarily be affected. Its not unlikely that Appnexus and Breitbart don't even have a direct relationship, and Appnexus is just going to block bids on that domain.

mzw_mzw 10y ago

Boycotting, ostracizing and shaming them didn't work the last fifty times, but it's bound to work this time!

misnome 10y ago
What do you suggest instead?
mhurron 10y ago
So you just pay people you fundamentally disagree with? Not every boycott is undertaken to change things, they can also be done simply to have nothing to do with what the target is doing.
exit 10y ago
it maybe be a necessary if not sufficient condition
yedava 10y ago
I don't think anyone is under the illusion that Breitbart can be boycotted or shamed. The market they cater to lives in a pretty air-tight bubble, the same bubble which sustains Fox News/Drudge Report/Rush Limbaugh etc....
- nerfhammer 10y ago
  Clickbait becomes pointless if all the ad networks ban them
- pyronik 10y ago
  You say this like the left doesn't have its own in the NYT, CNN, ABC, NBC, Huff, Salon, etc... that's much more of an bubbled echo chamber. At least on the right they get bombarded with MSM daily... they just know its straight up corrupt.
  - yedava 10y ago
    The left has its own biases, but to equate it with the Fox News/Breitbart bubble is dishonest. To take science as an example, the left has its own set of denialists (ex: anti-vaccers, anti-GMO), but the left has plenty of people who push back against such science denialism. The Fox News/Breitbart bubble doesn't have any such checking mechanism. There's a reason why creationism is popular in the US.
tobltobs 10y ago
It hasn't anything to do with Boycotting. It is just that some advertisers don't wanna pay to have their adverts shown next to those gross discussions.
- geekamongus 10y ago
  This is probably the most important point to consider about this situation.
- dhimes 10y ago
  This. I simply cannot have my ads on this type of site. So I will seek and pay for ad networks that guarantee that my ads don't appear there. This is simply the free market.
roywiggins 10y ago
It's possible that it actually has worked, and things would be even worse without.
- striking 10y ago
  It's a reference to Trump's presidency, and how some people think it was brought on by left-leaning journalists.

infinity0 10y ago

Responding to them with good arguments instead of repeating pseudo-sociological abstract bullshit? edit: looks like some prick is going through and systematically downvoting my posts. Go fuck yourself, you are the reason why Trump got elected. In reply to knz, I hope you see the illogicality of interpreting what I wrote above as "suggesting any argument [I] disagree with is [...]". Passing off the whole of the "alt-right" as "irrational" is exactly the sort of attitude that encourages previously-neutral people to leave social and progressive political groups. Unless you have a mathematical proof of this statement, I would be more humble in what one chooses to believe, and how one conducts one's arguments.

eli 10y ago
You want their ad network to argue with them?
- infinity0 10y ago
  Are you even trying to understand what other people say, or trying to sound good by attacking straw men?
  - eli 10y ago
    Sorry if that was too snarky. I guess my point is there obviously isn't one correct tactic. The people who run ad tech (or any other) businesses have a very binary decision: either they allow someone to be a customer or they don't.
yedava 10y ago
Just today Brietbart published articles pushing climate change denial and brigading Amazon reviews of a book because the said author disagrees with Donald Trump. How does one reason with such an obstinate worldview?
- Zenst 10y ago
  Well for me the way to deal with the whole "climate change" is wrong, if they were to say - "who wants cleaner air and water" - Nobody would argue and things would just move forward and avoid getting hung up on debate and endless papers and research to spell out the common sense. It is like arguing the compass direction to the nearest degree when if you said is the general wind N,S,E or west then everybody would agree it's just one of those and things would move in the right general direction instead of doing circles for years upon years, whilst time waits for nobody. In short, its how you define the issue in a way that everybody can relate too better and if that means going indirectly with the side-effect being the target, then so be it.

Kenji 10y ago

When will the liberals learn? Silencing only fuels this movement. Silencing is the path of least intellectual integrity. Don't they realize that every time they ban or block the alt-right, instead of refuting their arguments, the alt-right wins? People aren't that stupid, you can't just block the alt-right talking points out of their sight and thus out of their mind. Same thing with 'fake news'. The notion of 'hate speech' has been used so broadly that it is now inflated to complete meaninglessness.

michaelmrose 10y ago
Studies have shown that arguing with extremists makes them more resolute. Also not doing business with them isn't silencing them they are just as free to pursue their mission tomorrow as today.
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  The embargo on South Africa in protest of apartheid worked. I don't see why something similar wouldn't work here. Breitbart is first and foremost a business, and they have lots of employees on staff pushing these messages of hate that need to be paid. If their income stream dries up it makes it much harder to continue doing what they're doing.
  - gspetr 10y ago
    Small sample might be at fault here. For a counterexample: has the embargo on Iran worked?
- Kenji 10y ago
  Studies have shown that if you call someone you disagree with an extremist, fruitful conversation is extremely unlikely to happen.
tobltobs 10y ago
Not wasting customers marketing budgets == Silencing ?
10y ago

javery 10y ago

The world we are moving to is one where ad exchanges, google, and facebook get to decide what can survive on the web. This doesn't seem like a good thing.

bitwize 10y ago
Unfortunately for the USA, we can't quash hate with the law, but we still can use social means.
- Amezarak 10y ago
  Who gets to decide what 'hate' is? Breitbart claims it isn't: Breitbart responded saying it "has always and continues to condemn racism and bigotry in any form". The exchange refuses to say what triggered their action: "We use a number of third-party standards to determine what is and isn't hate speech, and if we detect a pattern of speech that could incite violence or discrimination against a minority group, we determine that to be non-compliant and we simply won't serve ads against it," AppNexus's spokesman Joshua Zeitz told the BBC. "I'm not going to put the examples out there because I'm not going to engage in a tit-for-tat on what is compliant." The article lists some headlines that they consider somewhat questionable, but you can easily google similar headlines focused on other groups from sites like the Huffington Post; e.g. "White People Are Too Dumb to Know They're Racist". Do you think we will see similar action taken against those such sites? Breitbart got its big start, I believe, from the atrocious hoaxes itperpetrated on ACORN, NPR, and other organizations to destroy their reputations unfairly. It has come a long way; it's now simply a very biased news organization that sometimes does decent reporting on undercovered topics. Yes, it is every ad network's right to refuse to associate with Breitbart or anyone else for that matter. But is this really the direction we, as a society, want to move in? Do we want ad networks taking activist stances about news websites? Do we want everyone to have to pick a side? Do we want people's careers destroyed for holding relatively mainstream opinions that happen to contradict the majority opinion?
  - Bud 10y ago
    >Yes, it is every ad network's right to refuse to associate with Breitbart or anyone else for that matter. But is this really the direction we, as a society, want to move in? Yes, this is the direction we as a society want to move in. The opposite direction from hate speech. A direction in which large commercial ad enterprises do not support neo-Nazi content and do not support neo-Nazis making a lot of money off said content; at least not on AppNexus' dime. This is precisely the direction we want to move in.

cloakandswagger 10y ago

Headlines like this along with the MSM's latest push to define "fake news" is pretty worrisome. Even if you don't agree with Breitbart or other outlets, it's frightening to think we could soon be in a world where entire stories are categorically dismissed or accepted based on their source, rather than their individual content.

um_ya 10y ago
The precursors of the "ministry of truth"
- acchow 10y ago
  Long time since I read the book, but did the precursors of the "ministry of truth" really start in corporations?
  - elcct 10y ago
    They figured out that using communism to steal from the people is not effective so they invented social democracy to steal via government fenced corporations. This gives people more sense of freedom whilst generating better yield for the ruling class.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      I'm pretty sure none of that is in the book.
- rconti 10y ago
  If anything, the precursor to the ministry of truth is a political figure making it clearer than ever that coverage he doesn't like will be severely punished. Not just by loss of access, but by lawsuits and changes to the law. It's hardly new that news organizations have to be a bit friendly to anyone they cover in order to preserve access. I cannot waltz into the White House press room and expect equal access, no matter how fair and intelligent my non-existent media empire is. But the scope and severity we have been promised is an order of magnitude worse.

tenpies 10y ago

> AppNexus has not given examples. > But a spokesman said a "human audit" of Breitbart had flagged several articles that had caused it concern because of the language they had featured. I'm not even a Breitbart reader but this strikes me as a ridiculously dangerous standard to use. "Human audit" is also my new favourite term for forming an opinion.

Bud 10y ago
This is not dangerous in any way. This is not a free speech issue. Commercial enterprises are entirely free to support business activity that they agree with, and refuse to support activity that they do not agree with. For those who are improperly conflating this issue with free speech or First Amendment rights in any way, you probably need a reminder: https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/
- FoxHound56 10y ago
  It is not legally a free speech issue. Sure. But it is in fact very, very dangerous. The amount of power that huge tech companies such as Google and Facebook have over people these days is not very far off from the power a government has over people. If they are using that power to silence people they disagree with then that is extremely dangerous. Even if you happen to agree with them this time, you might not in the future. The fact that they are not a government is irrelevant to how dangerous these actions are, considering they have the power to silence millions of people. It is not in any meaningful way comparable to a restaurant owner showing you the door, considering the scale of these networks.
- striking 10y ago
  History suggests otherwise, and so does the SCOTUS and ACLU. http://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/ http://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/
smsm42 10y ago
But you see, if you call it "my personal opinion", it sounds small and unimportant, but if you call it "human audit", it sounds like a cutting-age scientific technology to evaluate content. So it's clear which one should be chosen.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

MandieD 10y ago

Market forces at work...

zelon88 10y ago

With authors like Milo Yiannopoulos posting articles like "Why There Ought to Be a Cap on Women Studying Science and Maths" I would say they dug their own grave. If we really have to explain or justify why this is bad journalism maybe it shouldn't be considered journalism at all. I'm ok with that, but there should be open discussion and some methodology behind the future of journalistic classification.

rwmj 10y ago
It's really trolling, but it presents itself using the trappings of journalism which has a few benefits over old-fashioned trolling: First some people believe things which are presented in a certain way, through a "news site" etc. Secondly claiming to be a journalist provides some legal defences. There are examples of this in the UK too: Katie Hopkins is a master troll pretending to be a journalist (and with a column in a tabloid newspaper too).
ronnier 10y ago
This is the article mentioned above http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/15/heres-why-there-ought-to-be-a-cap-on-women-studying-science-and-maths/ http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/15/heres-why...
idetectit 10y ago
Hi, I find your comment problematic for two reasons. 1) If you replaced "women" with "men" in that title, I'm sure you'd have no problem with it. In fact, no doubt you'd probably gleefully Facebook it to all your tweet snapchatters on Instagram. and 2) Milo is a homosexual. You speak from a position of straight white male privilege and as such you are in no position to judge his journalistic skills or even question if it should be considered journalism at all. It sounds like what you really want is to only classify "journalism" as "stuff written by privileged straight white athiestic males and females with a liberal bent".
- zelon88 10y ago
  I don't believe there should be a cap on anyone's education; male, female, or otherwise. I also don't think that Milo is qualified to define what the word "journalism" means any more than I am. I can write opinions on a blog or onto a piece of paper. That doesn't make my work "journalism." Neither does declaring that I'm a journalist or declaring that my work is journalism. Also, sexual orientation doesn't give Milo a free pass to write click-bait and pass it off as journalism. It also doesn't excuse him from saying misogynistic things. I will respect Milo's right to say what he wants. That's it.

spoiledtechie 10y ago

This is quite frankly bad. Even the spokesman said he wasn't going to get into it (because it might hurt the PC police). It truly seems like there is a political backlash war going on. It seems so childish, but they are only trying to hurt Breitbarts bottom line. We are becoming even more divided.

vorotato 10y ago
Demographically speaking the major "divide", is by age. All we have to do it wait 30 years and the divide will be over.
- tropo 10y ago
  In those 30 years, many young liberals will turn into old conservatives. New liberals will be born to replace the ones who became conservatives. This divide isn't going anywhere.
  - internaut 10y ago
    That isn't a universal pattern. The generation after millennials is more conservative. You should look up the statistics for political affiliation of Israeli youth. With my generation I am far right. Among the younger generation I'm the moderate.

datenheini 10y ago

Facebook wants no nipples, AppNexus wants no alt-right. Their house, their rules.

btilly 10y ago

As long as Breitbart has a large audience that advertisers wish to sell things to, economic pressure will lead them to advertise there. If this particular ad network won't, then they will find one that will. Therefore this will not hurt Breitbart.

wcummings 10y ago

>"Breitbart is the most pro-Israel site in the United States of America," he added. If you define "pro-Israel" as "anti-Arab", maybe.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

venantius 10y ago

I see a lot of concerns about censorship here. One of the things that isn't really being talked about is the fact that Facebook, Google etc. are directly responsible for these organizations being promoted in the first place. Absent these content aggregators, Breitbart might never have had a significant following in the first place. In that context, them taking actions to lower its priority in various ways bothers me a lot less.

yladiz 10y ago

I see little wrong with this. I understand the idea that it's not necessarily right that ad companies stop supporting something based on ill-defined criteria, and I do support the idea that the criteria should be well defined. In this case, I think the criteria is pretty well defined: "pattern of speech that could incite violence or discrimination against a minority group." Although the site says that they, "have always and continue to condemn racism and bigotry in any form," their actions, in this case articles like, "Why There Ought to Be a Cap on Women Studying Science and Maths"[1], doesn't reflect that message and this in particular is discriminatory against women. There are other examples in the BBC article as well. The BBC article also mentions that the articles in question were written by a guest author, not a staff member, but the onus on posting something on the website falls on the staff, so that argument falls flat. The other and simpler reality is that they are a private company that can do what they want when it comes to how they utilize their resources. If they don't want to serve ads on Breitbart then it's their choice. Even if they just arbitrarily chose to disallow Breitbart on their platform, it might be unjust but it's their right and choice. On a more philosophical note, consider that all these issues of "fake news losing ad revenue" and the one mentioned here are generally only possible because the media is very free to post whatever they want and get paid for it, thanks to the USA's extremely free media laws. It isn't ideal for sure, but in some respects I'd rather have this reality where we worry about a specific news organization losing ad revenue than the reality where the only news that I can read is state sponsored. 1: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/15/heres-why-there-ought-to-be-a-cap-on-women-studying-science-and-maths/ http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/15/heres-why...

smsm42 10y ago

Well, AppNexus is certainly free to act out their ideological biases. I'm pretty sure there are more than one ad networks, including ones which don't make agreeing with network's management on political matters a prerequisite for doing business with them, and Breibart would be completely fine.