| Dear Katy, CREDO members recently helped force Bill O'Reilly, Fox News' flagship racist and misogynist, off the air. Now we need to turn our attention to Breitbart, the white supremacist, misogynistic, fake news media outlet formerly run by Steve Bannon that helped fuel Donald Trump's rise to power. After months of pressure from progressive activists, more than 1,000 advertisers have abandoned Breitbart over its racist, sexist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic reporting.1 But one company stands out for continuing to fund Breitbart's hate: Amazon. Our friends at UltraViolet, SumOfUs and MoveOn — along with the social media campaign Sleeping Giants — have been pushing on Amazon executives for months, but they have so far refused to pull their ads. Can you help ramp up the pressure today? Tell Amazon: Stop funding Breitbart's hate. Click here to sign the petition. Amazon won't accept discriminatory ads on its own site.2 There is no reason for it to advertise on a site that is literally the breeding ground for some of the most toxic hate in the country. The outrage against Amazon funding Breitbart's hate is growing inside the company. More than 550 employees have signed a petition demanding that executives stop advertising on Breitbart.3 According to an email sent to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Senior Vice President Jeff Blackburn, an employee asked Blackburn, "What is it going to take for us to stop advertising on Breitbart News?" at a March company-wide meeting.4 Blackburn shifted the blame from Amazon to the third-party ad exchanges through which it buys its ads, but that seems a weak excuse given the enormous number of advertisers who have successfully cut their ties with Breitbart.5 Amazon's ads on Breitbart are not the only troubling part of its track record when it comes to Trump's dangerous agenda. In December, Bezos was part of a meeting between tech CEOs and Trump that helped normalize and legitimize Trump and his extremism. Bezos called the meeting "very productive."6 That same month, CREDO partnered with our friends at Muslim Advocates, Color Of Change, MPower Change, Courage Campaign, Democracy for America and more than a dozen other progressive and civil rights groups to demand that tech companies refuse to help build Trump's Muslim registry. While Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, IBM and Microsoft all pledged not to enable Trump's xenophobic hate, Amazon failed to join them.7 Amazon's leaders have a choice: They can get their ads off Breitbart and make sure they never appear on other sites that promote racism, xenophobia and misogyny, or they can keep funding hate. Can you add your voice to demand they do the right thing? Tell Amazon: Stop funding Breitbart's hate. Click the link below to sign the petition: https://act.credoaction.com/sign/Amazon_Breitbart?t=6&akid=23063.12967895.wvtI5c Thanks for everything you do, Heidi Hess, Senior Campaign Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets Add your name: References: - Tom Embury-Dennis, "Breitbart 'loses advertising deals' with more than 1,000 companies," Feb. 16, 2017.
- Amazon, "Creative acceptance policy," accessed April 20, 2017.
- Lauren C. Williams, "Amazon employees pressure CEO to kill Breitbart ads," ThinkProgress, April 14, 2017.
- Charlie Warzel, "Over 550 Amazon employees are pressuring leadership to cut advertising ties with Breitbart," Buzzfeed, April 13, 2017.
- Ibid.
- David Streitfeld, "'I'm here to help,' Trump tells tech executives at meeting," The New York Times, Dec. 14, 2016.
- Sarah A. Harvard, "These 3 major Silicon Valley tech companies haven't condemned Trump's Muslim registry proposal," Mic, Jan. 18, 2017.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment