Meet the woman who took out Breitbart News.

The trolls couldn’t stop her, Steve Bannon couldn’t stop her; Hell, The Mercer’s themselves couldn’t stop her. Nandini Jammi, was the cofounder of Sleeping Giants. She tells Denver what it took to smash Breitbart’s ad revenue, what CheckMyAds.org does to combat the disinformation economy and what inspired Nandini Jammi to become one of the most effective marketing activists in the country.

Breitbart was launched in 2005 and named for its founder, a right-wing media maverick called Andrew Breitbart. He had been a protégé of Matt Drudge, whose site The Drudge Report remains one of the most powerful and influential news aggregation sites on the web, especially for those on the political right. Breitbart’s idea was to create a “Huffington Post of the right” – a site on which he had also worked.

The site enjoyed lots of early successes, in part because Drudge helped out his friend by regularly featuring Breitbart stories on his site, funnelling monster traffic. Breitbart also broke some big stories; in particular, it was instrumental in the sexting scandal that led to the downfall of Anthony Weiner, then a rising-star congressman.

Nandini Jammi (born 1988 or 1989) is an American activist and brand safety consultant. She is a co-founder of the Check My Ads agency and associated non-profit Check My Ads Institute. Previously, she co-founded Sleeping Giants. She is active in informing businesses that their advertisements are appearing on websites that she describes as bad faith publishers—websites that publish misinformation or conspiracy theories, or engage in advertising fraud—and pressuring them to stop supporting those publishers.

Breitbart News Network (known commonly as Breitbart News, Breitbart, or Breitbart.com) is an American far-right[5] syndicated news, opinion, and commentary website founded in mid-2007 by American conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart. Its content has been described as misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist by academics and journalists. The site has published a number of conspiracy theories and intentionally misleading stories. Posts originating from the Breitbart News Facebook page are among the most widely shared political content on Facebook.

2024: Meta will no longer prompt political content across apps.

Meta is set to stop promoting political content across the company’s social apps.

In a report released on both Meta’s Transparency Centre and an Instagram blog post, the content-sharing giant made its approach clear.

“People have told us they want to see less political content, so we have spent the last few years refining our approach on Facebook to reduce the amount of political content – including from politicians’ accounts – you see in Feed, Reels, Watch, Groups You Should Join, and Pages You May Like,” the report read.

The company stated that following a political account will not result in related or linked accounts being proactively suggested if this isn’t your cup of tea.

Facebook.

According to the announcement, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms will also play their part in considering “personalized signals, like survey responses, that help us understand what is informative, meaningful, or worth your time” on Facebook. The posts also state that the customization of preferences can be made via Facebook ‘Feed Preferences’ and that the AI recommendations and personalization can be limited.

The releases announced, “If you don’t want AI systems to personalize your Feed at all, you can use the Feeds tab, which will rank posts chronologically. You can also add people to your Favorites list, so you always see content from your favorite accounts.”

Instagram and Threads.

On the Instagram and Threads front, Meta states that it would like both apps to be a great experience for all users and reassures users that the company “won’t proactively recommend content about politics on recommendation surfaces across Instagram and Threads.” The apps seem to be walking away from the previous approach of suggesting accounts and content that might be politically charged. “If you decide to follow accounts that post political content, we don’t want to get between you and their posts, but we also don’t want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow,” said the blog post.

Account Status will control the chances that professional accounts have in getting into a user’s eyesight, but this will be determined by their posting of political content and Meta’s decision-making on what it sees as ‘political’ and potentially barring the way.

The platform has said that through the settings, a user can disagree with a post that is deemed ‘political,’ saying “they (Users) can edit or remove recent posts, request a review if they disagree with our decision, or stop posting this type of content for a period of time, in order to be eligible to be recommended again.”

With the U.S. elections taking center stage in the media for the foreseeable future this move by Meta will be an interesting one for politicians and voters across 2024.

2018: Bannon to step down from Breitbart News Network after public break with Trump.

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon stepped down Tuesday as executive chairman of Breitbart News, a swift and stunning fall for a leading figure on the American right who was recently rebuked by President Donald Trump and abandoned by his key financial backer.

Trump publicly broke with Bannon in dramatic fashion last week, suggesting his former top adviser had “lost his mind” in response to critical comments Bannon made about members of the Trump family and campaign in Michael Wolff’s incendiary new book, “Fire and Fury.”

Breitbart’s announcement came on the same day that Trump discussed comprehensive immigration reform at the White House and said he would attend the elite World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, later this month, and just weeks after he signed a bill cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy — all moves that cut against Bannon’s nationalist, populist vision and show how his influence has waned since he was hailed as the mastermind behind Trump’s 2016 victory.

https://www.politico.eu/article/steve-bannon-steps-down-from-breitbart-news-former-white-house-chief-strategist/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/bannon-to-step-down-from-breitbart-news-network-after-public-break-with-trump

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2019/07/rise-and-fall-breitbart

https://readwrite.com/meta-will-no-longer-prompt-political-content-across-apps/