TANGOTI Classic: She built a movement to take on Breitbart

the Brianna Taylor Tragedy. You might also recall that Mattingly also tried to sue Brianna Taylor's boyfriend for emotional distress. Activist Nandini Jamie started a petition on move on dot org to stop Mattingly from profiting from Brianna Taylor's death and story through this book deal. Her petition not overt signatures in just five hours, and Simon and Schuster ultimately

announced they would no longer be involved in distributing this book. Now, this is a great reminder that anyone can use their voice to make an impact. We heard from Nandini last fall when she opened up about her work tracking how brands are funding online hate through ad dollars. Let's revisit her story on speaking up and how learning to own your voice can change the world. Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy. There's no hiring bias against women in tech.

They just suck at interviews. Will be rather your child have feminism or cancer? All of these completely messed up headlines were actual headlines of stories published on the far right website bright bark dot com, known for publishing misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist articles, dangerous conspiracy theories, and deliberately misleading stories. It's also one of the most important sites in the era of Trump. Their former chairman, Steve Bannon, even served

as Trump's chief strategist. And where there's an online website, there's brands keeping that website afloat by giving the money to run ads on that website. But one group went on a mission to make that kind of racism, misogyny in hate speech unprofitable. Sleeping Giants became one of the

most influential activist organizations of the Trump era. Their strategy involved urging their members to tweet screenshots of brands running ads on websites that support and published hate speech, asking if those sites match their values and urging them to pull their ads. In doing so, they learned that oftentimes reputable brands have no idea what sites their ads run on. Sleeping Giants was run anonymously to create the impression that

it was run by more than just two people. After the conservative news outlet Daily Caller published a piece out in one person behind Sleeping Giants, Matt Rivets, he and his family faced death threats. Later, Matt was profiled in a New York Times piece alongside Sleeping Giants co founder Nandini Jammy Sleeping Giants was so successful that they contributed

to Breitbart seeing a nine drop and ad revenue. They also contributed to a broader conversation about how reputable brands are funding extremism by spending ad money on websites that published hate speech. So this should be a success story right. In July, Nandini published a scathing piece on medium, saying that while she believes she was working with Man as a partner, he gaslighted her out of the movement they

built together. While they're working, relationships started on a good note, Matt began taking high profile speaking engagements and obscuring her

role in their work, eventually erasing her altogether. She writes, I want to share with you my journey was sleeping giants while taking credit matters, and while you must fight for yourself as hard as you fight for your cause, I want to show you how a woman of color almost disappeared from the movement she built, and what you can achieve when you refuse to follow the rules your white male leader sets for you. I hope other brilliant women of color and marginalized folks see yourselves in me

and don't wait as long as I did. The stakes are too high for you to disappear. Now Nandini has done getting her voice be left out of the narrative. So how did you get started in this work? In November, I was working as as head of growth for a tech startup and I went to visit Breitbart dot Com

for the first time after the elections. Just like everyone else, I was trying to figure out what happened and what we're dealing with here, and the first thing I noticed was ads for some of the biggest companies in the world on this website. You know, we've been hearing a lot about how it was putting out pay speech and you know, misinformation and bake stories and all that stuff, But no one had ever really talked about, um the ads and the ads are how that website makes money.

So I'm no genius. I just I had like one a Google ad campaign like once a couple of months before that, and I I had been quite particular about where my ads were going. I was, I was curious and interested in making sure they were appearing in uh in sort of reputable places on the Internet. And so the first thing I thought of was, you know the site placements. You know, the the marketers for running their

campaigns are not looking at their site placements. And all we have to do is get these um get these folks to add brighte bart dot com to their exclusion list. If they do that, then brighte bart will no longer make money. Like it was kind of like a crazy idea because there are so many companies who have Google ads, like possibly millions um and and the idea was to get all of them to one by one to drop

to drop right part. So UM, I I wrote a little I wrote a Medium post and hoped for it to go viral UM where basically sort of outlined this crack pot idea where I was like, we should all just go into our Google ads added to our exclusion list and then bride Bart won't receive our money anymore

and then they'll go out of business. And UM. While that piece didn't go viral, the concept of tweeting at a company, which is something that I did as while I tweeted out at like Old maybe that was the first at I saw UM and letting them know that their ad is funding uh this hateful website was UM was something that that took off someone uh, someone else on the other side of the country, my my partner

who became my partner UM had the same idea. We we sort of went into business in that sense in uh, in terms of reaching out to companies and asking them to check their ads and make sure that they have ripe Bart on their on their exclusion list, and it just kind of took off from there. So from you writing this piece urging these brands to to block you know, ad spins on Breitbart, this is how you first got connected with Matt. Matt reached out to you from this

piece and thought we should work together. How did this How did your relationship with Matt and Sleeping Giants come to be. So I wrote this piece on I believe it was November, and then by the next day I had he had tech like tweeted at me saying, awesome article. We're doing the same thing. We should you know, UM, you should join us. And I was like super excited to see that someone else had the same idea. We

moved very quickly from d MS to email to phone. UM. Turns out like we just have a lot in common. We're both copyriters, UM, were both originally from Maryland, UM, and and yeah, he seemed really cool, so I wanted to of course I wanted to work together. UM. I think like for me, working joining for this meant that we were like partners. UM. He had just started Sleeping Giants as an account a week before, and it was it was still nothing, you know, there was maybe a

couple of dozen, maybe a couple hundred followers. UM. What we decided to do was I would run the Facebook page. So we started up with Facebook page, which I um became responsible for, and he continued to learn the Twitter account. And there was no like formal agreement or anything like that because we never imagined that it would turn into anything. So we were just like al right, like it was just taking it one day at a time, flying by

the seat of our pants, kind of a deal. Nondini and Matt hit on something big by harnessing the power of collective social media users to pressure brands out of funding hate. They were having a real impact. They got thousands of brands like A T and T, BMW, visa lift warby Parker to stop running as on bright Bart. Steve Bannon was even recorded talking about Sleeping Giants at

a dinner in two thousand eighteen. When I left and to take early campaign, we were gonna make like eight million dollars three cans flow that after we won UM. This group called Sleeping Giants a group of texts. They literally stripped out. They went to the thirty five exchanges that sell the ants one so the ad dropped like ninety.

They even got Breitbart so mad that after Kelloggs pulled their ads, Breitbart tried to organize an embarrassingly unsuccessful counterboycott, which Kelloggs said had no discernible impact on their sales. After it was revealed that Fox News is Bill O'Reilly settled five different sexual harassment suits Sleeping Giants pressured brands to stop advertising on a show. In a week's time, the O'Reilly Factor lost more than half of its advertisers,

and Bill O'Reilly went on vacation and never returned. What were some of the successes that you all had with Sleeping Giants that you were really proud of? Oh my god, we did We did so much. Um. I mean there was just a daily grind of of getting ads to drop we I mean just the first few months, the first few months of this campaign was every day, um, you know, a couple of dozen brands or whatever would would drop right Bart. Sometimes it would be like really

big ones. So our first big win was Kelloggs. That was like that resulted in uh bride Bart starting a campaign called I think it was like dump Kelloggs or something, and it was it completely backfired and they were like, Kelloggs, Kellogg's doesn't support our uh you know, bripe Bart readers. So we're going, we're gonna We're gonna dump Kellogg's in the sink or something like that. It was so stupid, um, but it gave us our first international headlines, so that

was really cool. Um. But yeah, the first the first couple of months was just like just like every every so often, some big brand would come out and be like, yeah, we're not we don't support this ship. And then um, after a while, we we felt like we could, you know, start working on other things. The first time we moved out of the sort of grew out of the brepe bartwork was when we decided to target Bill O'Reilly's advertisers.

Bill O'Reilly had been sexually harassing his colleagues in the workplace for um a period of decades, and The New York Times reported on it. We were like, well, this really does this fits into our our mission statement of making bigotry and sexism unprofitable, and we felt like this

is something we could take on. So we um, we decided to contact Bill O'Reilly advertisers using the same exact m O that we did with Bright Bar, just you know, presenting them with the information and letting them make their own decision. And Bill O'Reilly lost dozens of advertisers, and a couple of months later he was on spring break and or an unplanned vacation or whatever plan vacation heavy scare quotes around that, I know, right, Yeah, and then he was he was gone and they were like, Wow,

we we're really onto something and um. And then we went on to uh target Tucker Carlson's advertisers. He's lost over I believe eight advertisers over the past two years that we've been working on that. Um. His show is basically uh unprofitable. It's one of the highest rated shows on television. It just doesn't bring in any money. Yeah. Just as a side note, one of my day jobs involves working with a feminist activist group and we've targeted

Tucker Carlson over the years. And I don't know what the deal is, but it's like that guy just keeps hanging on. We can't we can't seem to get him out of here. I think it's a lot of personal spite, to be honest, because after we got we got there, there was one advertiser, um who uh there their their language learning app called Babel, and they put out quite

the blistering statement on their Tucker Carlson ads. UM. They were sort of caught, uh caught unawares, and they responded to our tweet saying, uh, this is uh We're so sorry. We never um, you know, we're disappointed that our ads showed up on Tucker Carlson. We find his rhetoric to be repugnant, and that just triggered them. Um, they released I think their first statement specifically calling us out. Um it was us Media Matters and move on dot org and it was actually, I mean, I was very proud

of that. I mean, we're just two people running an account in our spare time. So I felt like I felt pretty proud of proud of ourselves. Then you should definitely feel so proud of the work that you accomplished um with Sleeping Giants, even though it you know, you should, no one can take that away from you. That those are huge winds and also huge, you know, culture changing moments. You know this idea that, yeah, brands do have a responsibility to be a little bit cheesy about what their

money goes. We should be pressuring brands to open their eyes to where they spend their money. Like that's a huge cultural shift that I don't think existed before your work. So you should definitely feel very very proud and accomplished about that. Thank you. So when did things start to feel not so good working with man on Sleeping Giants? Yeah, so we had a really good relationship from the beginning. UM, he he was very nice to me and UM, and

I also I admired him a lot. Uh and I UM, I never imagined that there would ever be problems because it was like we're we're both here every day putting in the work, and UM and we I think there was a lot of mutual respect. At least that's what it felt like. When Matt realized that he was about to be docked by The Daily Pollar, he went to The New York Times to sort of get get ahead of the story, and during that time asked me whether

I would like to be interviewed for the story. And I guess I I mean I when he said that, I think I assumed that I was being asked as a partner. I spoke to the reporter. I told her, UM, you know how I was involved and all the stuff that we were doing, and you know a little bit of background detail on on how he worked. And she asked me if I was UM. She asked me what my title was and I said co founder and then

she was like great. And then she comes back the next day and does a little fact check in and UM, and she's like, by the way, your partner said that you are not a co founder, and I was like, oh, okay, and I didn't want to make a big deal out of it, so I didn't. I was like, just go with whatever he says. But UM. That was sort of

the first indicator that something was off UM. And then after that, my uh, you know, the story came out, and my partner went on to take interviews with uh, sort of high profile outlets like Platsy America with UM carras Squsher spoke with Katie Kurig. And it was after his interview with ad Week that I became concerned about UM, about everything because he uh, he had called himself UM. He was positioning himself as co founder, which was fined

by me. But in that article, I was positioned or portrayed as UM, one of the individuals helping him run the accounts. So at that point I called a meeting and I said, hey, listen, I don't want to be

portrayed as your help or or your assistant. It's important that I UM that I'm also portrayed as a leader, because you know, I have been involved in this work for the whole time, and I realized that I'm in a really unique position like both of us were both in a very unique position to be able to influence the advertising industry. And I want to be able to speak at conferences and events, and I want to be present at the table when some of these big decisions

are being made. And that's why it's important to me to have a title. UM. So I you know, we had that discussion and he said, UM, I completely understand. Let's get you a title. You can call yourself, UM, you know, whatever you want, obviously not founder. I'm the founder, so you can call yourself, you know, come up with any So I said, how about founding organizer? And he agreed to that. So that is UM, That's what I

called myself for about a year. During that time, he he continued to position himself as founder, of course, and was able to leverage that too, UM to get invited to big conferences. Uh you know, I don't know, for example, south By Southwest and UM Advertising Week and so on. And I just kind of felt like I was flailing. I didn't really have an opportunity to um to you know, to to speak at anything like that because I mean, I I didn't have a title, and b I didn't

have any contacts in the industry. I truly was sort of cast out on my own again, like advertising isn't really my world. I don't have connections in that industry I worked in, Like the tech startup scene, it's a totally different world. So UM, so it was, it was. It was frustrating I couldn't get to where I wanted to be. So what I did was I asked him for I basically asked him for the scraps. I was like, can I like, would you mind telling me about some

of these conferences that you're going to. I would love to come along. I would like to be your plus one. Um, you know, we can work the room together, we can meet more people together. UM. You know. I was always really careful about I don't want to steal your thunder. I don't want the attention. I just want to be working in the background. UM two, I don't know to

to to make something happen. And um and he would you know, there was there was a power differential there because he this is his industry, and he's older than me, and he knows more people than me. And he would bring that up quite frequently in the calls that we had. UM, where I was sort of outlining my issues, so he never really um, you know, he'd always say, yeah, sure I will, you know, I'll let you know, i'll give you I'll give you a shout if these if these

things happened, but he never did. There was a couple of other things that concerned me. I didn't have any access to the general Increase email, just like I just didn't know what was coming into into the organization, Like was he receiving media opportunities there um or opportunities to speak, private consulting opportunities. These were the kinds of things that weren't coming to me necessarily. Um he was asking me too. He had asked me to send all press requests to

him because that would help us stay on message. So you don't want too many people speaking to the press. I thought that was a little weird because you know, I was writing the Facebook count completely independently. It's not like I was getting permission from him before I wrote post or anything like that. So it's not like I would muddle the message because I know what the message is.

I write the message every day. I don't think I just I don't like I'm not involved in anything related to the merch shop I don't know how much money is being made. I don't know how it's been spent um. When I asked for access to that, he said, you're just gonna have to trust me, And yeah, I didn't know. I didn't I didn't know what to do with that. We'll be right back, let's get right back into it. As Matt's public profile grew, Nandini's role in Sleeping Giants

was obscured. As she writes in her medium piece on Twitter, Matt began to replace what was once a collective we with I and my The work I had done with Sleeping Giants was also appearing on its conference bio. The vagueness that once helped us look like a mysterious group bigger than we were was now being claimed solely by him. I didn't have the media attention or connections that Matt did. I wasn't forty five white, and I certainly didn't know

anybody in advertising. I was young, unknown, and invisible. It's difficult for me to hear about Nundini's experience with Sleeping Giants. I certainly know what it's like to be passed over for being credited or compensated for my work and if you're a woman, especially a woman of color, you probably know what that feels like too. I've avoided speaking up because I didn't want to seem like a bragger or someone who couldn't share the spotlight, or worse, someone who

was only interested in accolades. And in our deeply sexist culture, is there anything more shameful than being a woman who wants success? And it's especially tricky when you're working for social change, the implication being that we should all be doing the work just because we care about making change, not because we want credit. But this line of thinking can actually be kind of a trap that keeps us from taking what's ours while our winds are claimed by

somebody else. You're not an attention seeker for wanting to be acknowledged for your work. One thing that I hear time and time again is why it's important to get credit. I feel like people really need to understand that it's

not about fame and fortune and the limelight. Unfortunately, the way that it works in the in many tech industries is if you don't have a title, or if you don't if you're not able to point to something and say yeah, I did that, you're not going to get invited to the conference, You're not going to get invited to speak, You're not going to get you know, the consulting opportunity, You're not going to be able to build up your platform to be able to have a bigger

footprint to do the kind of work and make the kind of change that you want to make. And so when women, particularly women of color, advocate for themselves to get the title, to get the credit, it's not because we're same hungry, you know, attention hungry, you know, spotlight hogs. It's because if we don't don't have those things, we're not going to be able to have the kind of

impact that we want to be able to have. And so I think that, I mean, I guess I know that I have often felt a little skittish about asking for a title or because I don't want to look like I'm trying to, you know, be a fame a fame hug or something, when in reality, it's just how it's just the nature of how a lot of these businesses work. But I mean, you said it, that's exactly right.

I was so afraid of looking like for being perceived as someone who just wanted attention that I tried to sidestep that issue by uh, by denying my self credit and by sort of actively staying away from the titles that would have given me the power I needed as a co founder. When I finally made that shift from a nonsense title founding organizer doesn't mean anything. It's like assistant to the regional manager. Um. When I made that ift, uh, I just I found that people responded to me differently.

I found that I took myself more seriously. UM. It was really eye opening to me to see how how important titles are for people who are not traditionally viewed as leaders in the society. UM. I almost underestimated myself, Like how I guess I didn't realize how the how the world sees me that was. That was something that

I kind of learned the hard way the world. Uh. You know, despite the fact that I was good at what I do, that I had demonstrated my my abilities, I people looked at me and didn't see me as a leader. A lot I'm sure a lot of people still don't. UM. So really claiming that title is one of the most important things that you can do, and I don't want anyone to think that. UM. That doing that is is some kind of of making a bee line for the game and fortune or the glory of

it all. Nandini decided that she was going to stop playing by the rules Matt set for her, the rules that allowed him to grow his public profile while she went forgotten and overlooked the rules that allowed Matt to fly to France to accept the prestigious Cans Lion Award, essentially the Oscars of the creative industry on behalf of the organization they created together without even telling her. So when did you decide I am going to claim this title for myself. I'm going to walk in, walk in

this title and walk in this purpose. And I don't care what Matt thinks. It was after. It was after he deemed me a picture of himself accepting a canned Gold Lion in June nineteen, and it was super casual, like, hey, we just want a candle gold Lion. And he hadn't told me he was going to be in France. That he hadn't told, Like, I've found out through Instagram that he was in can I had to d m him and be like, oh cool, you're in Europe, and uh yeah,

it was it was. It was really shocking, and I had that was a very fault week for me because first of all, I, as I said, I'm not from the industry, so I knew the cand gold line was a big deal, but I didn't realize that it was like the oscars of the ad industry. And I was receiving messages from all sorts of people that I but never talked to me. We're like, wow, congratulations, and it was it was it was like additional emotional labor for me. I had to I had to basically lie on his behalf,

you know. People asked me why I wasn't there, and if I said the truth, I wasn't invited, I wasn't told. That would that would sort of blow our cover, right, and I didn't want to create problems for sleeping giants, So I just I was like, yeah, I just couldn't make it. So I realized at that point that I was I was not actually ever going to be made a part of this campaign. I was being actively erased

from the story. Um. I was not mentioned anywhere at one of our our sort of highest points of our campaign. And I realized that all the things that I had been doing over the past year. We're only serving too, We're only serving him and allowing him to sort of

accumulate power. And I was giving up my power. I was giving up my power when I sent over press requests to him, which allowed him to build out his resume and you know and say, you know I've spoken to where I have been quoted in all these news outlets. I was giving up my ability to do the same.

I was giving up my power when I allowed myself to be called founding organizer and UM and being consistently seen as a number two and someone who doesn't you know, necessarily know what's going on or or can speak for the organization. So I made an executive decision over my own life. I promoted myself to co founder and the first opportunity I had to do that was about two months later. It was actually this exactly this time last

year when I UM. I was preparing for presentation for a talk in Scotland, and just a few days before I was looking for a fresh example of tech platforms being irresponsible and I went to the ku Klux Plans website and found PayPal, a PayPal which it on their site. And my brain is so broken that I don't know what a big deal is anymore. I just tweeted it out like I tweeted a million other things, and I

moved on, you know, and UM. A couple of days later, just right after I gave that big talk where someone had changed my title bless them, from from co founder, from founding organizer to co founder without my knowledge, but you know again, bless them. So a couple of days after that, PayPal banned the KKK from their services. At the BBC called me asking for a quote, and I told them that I was co founder of Sleeping Giants. UM. The day after that, I got a profile out in

an ad industry magazine called The Drum. It turns out that the reporter that I spoke to, the first reporter I spoke to after the conference, was doing a profile on me, And so I had this all of a sudden, I had this profile and me calling calling me the co founder of Sleepy Giants, and they had, you know, they had. It was like a full peace on what I think of the ad industry and how things are going. Wow, what did that feel like for you? It felt like I had just come into my power, Like I had

just stepped into my power. I was actually, um, I was with my friend Claire, who is now my business partner, and we just looked at each other. I mean, she knew that I had been going through a lot, and we just looked at each other and we were like, Wow, everything is turning around. Look how quickly things turn around when you claim what's yours. Fuck yeah, I'm like, I'm like on the verge of tears listening to this. I

think your story is your story, is my story. Your story is the story of so many women of color out there. I think that we are often told that there is virtue in just keep your head down and do your work and be behind the scenes. There's a virtue in making yourself small and not claiming that power. And then when you when you when you ride in that lane of making yourself small, of not walking in your power, and then you finally say I'm done with this. Today is the day that I that I that I

abandoned that and I walk in my power. The feeling like it is, it is like nothing else, and it comes from inside right. And I think that we are sold this lie that the path of just keep grinding, keep your head down, and you'll get your you'll get your reward, you'll get your credit someday. Maybe it just really doesn't. It doesn't serve us, No, it doesn't. I

I spent. I can't imagine what I could have accomplished if you know what I could have accomplished even sooner, if I hadn't you know, if I had chosen to step into that power before. What what I did instead? Because after after that can incident, I was I was I was going to leave. I mean, I deeply considered leaving Sleeping Giants because I wasn't getting the respect I was asking for. Because I was going to I'm always gonna get was the crumbs in the relationship, in the

way that it stood at that point in time. What I did instead was I decided to stay, and I decided that I would change the rules. I wasn't going to play by the rules that were made for me. I guess the moment that I stopped playing by the rules, and when I started to uh to speak to the press, to start writing under my own name, which is something that I hadn't been doing, people started to see. First

of all, people just started to see me. I just became more visible, and that put me in a position where people wanted to reach out to me because they wanted to talk to me about my thoughts. And that allowed me to start connecting with people in the industry. And that's what helped me to meet the people who would become my allies, the people who would make introductions for me in the industry, um, you know, the people who would become my future business partners. And it was

a slow moving situation. UM. None of it happened overnight. But really that investment in building relationships UM and building my knowledge was what helped me get to the point where I could just come out and say, I am co founder, and uh, this is who I am. You talked earlier about your allies. You have this great line on your medium piece that I love you say. It costs nothing to make space for me, It cost nothing to see see me in, It cost nothing to empower

other people to achieve their goals. And I think you just really hit the nail on the head. All the people in my life move been my allies and my co conspirators. They are the ones who are down to send the email down, to write a reference, down, to

connect me with an opportunity. Because it doesn't cost them anything, and I really think we need to reject this mindset that tells us that we have to be stingy when it comes to resources or putting somebody else on, because what's better is if we lift others up as we climb, and all of our work is better when we empower

each other. There's truly enough room for all of us. Absolutely, I mean, there were so many times where I I mean, I mean I I learned so much in the past year, and many times I offered to get on calls with you know, with my partner and brief him on what I had learned, and I wanted to make it work, and to the point that I was willing to continue working with someone who was fairly toxic towards me in

the way that he spoke to me at times. But I wanted to make it work because the movement that we have here, the movement that we have built, is more important than either one of our egos. Do you ever feel that, you know, I don't really even know how to put this. Like, in work that involves tech and the internet, we have this myth that there's this one genius, usually a white dude, but it's usually this

like one genius who does everything. Like we love the idea that there's you know, one lone wolf who was doing this really cool work, and that really denies what we know is the truth that so much of this work is collaborative, So much of it is, you know, people working together. Do you think that's a like like a problem in the tech space and in the sort of ad space in general. Oh yeah, I mean I could see the press was dying to find their lone

wolf hero for this sleeping Giant story. Like I just don't think they knew what to do with a woman like in the story, which made no sense to me because in the New York Times article, in our big coming out article, we were equally waited visually, you know, the pictures were the same size. Why did no one ask about me? Like where did the girl go? Where is she at? What does she think about the issues? I mean, it is a camp pain against bigotry and sexism.

Where is the brown girl? So yeah, I think the industry as well as the media is looking for their um, for their white man savior, which is a problem. But I believe that I believe that, I um, I mean, I've I've taken those lessons to heart, and I I see how these stories are built now, and I am dead set on never letting that happen again, at least in in my life and in my in my work.

UM and the people whose lives that I touch. UM with the company that Claire and I ended up starting after a year of working together, researching things together, interviewing people together, we launched this company as co founders, as equal partners. There was never any question about it. And I have name dropped her in well, I guess, in our relationship now as we started, as we started this company, I'm sort of the more well known person, and I that sort of gives me, that sort of puts me

in a place of privilege in our relationship. And so I use that to name drop her in everything that I do. And when I see an opportunity where I think, you know, an opportunity comes to me that I think she's better suited for UM, I send it over to

her and she does the same for me. Let's take a quick break and we're back alongside our partner, Claire atkin Nandini now runs check my Ads, an organization that helps brands keep their ad money away from fake news, disinformation, and hate speech, and as much behind the scene in success as she had getting brands to pull their ad dollars away from inflammatory sites with sleeping giants, their work

created another kind of problem. Brands, concerned about ending up and sleeping giants as crosshairs and weary of being associated with anything negative, started using keyword blocking software to make sure their ads weren't running on controversial topics. Now Wired reports that these ad blockers actually end up blocking terms

and kind of haphazard ways. The magazine publisher Hearst complained that articles about Megan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, spelled s U s s e X. We're being blocked because the word sex appeared on blocklists. What's worse, terms like

lesbian and bisexual we're blocked for being controversial. Some blocklists also blocked ad placements on news articles from reputable sites about coronavirus information, and some brands were blocking their ads from news sites in general, creating less ad money for an already struggling news industry. Her new company, check My Ads aims to tackle the issues Her workless Sleeping Giants might have inadvertently contributed to. So I want to talk

about check my ads. I was just reading the Wired piece about check my ads, so in a in a kind of way, and forgive me if I bungle this, and feel free to correct me. I'm no ad tech person,

but I gotta handle on it. So in a kind of way, sleeping giants as as many you know, successes as y'all had, in a kind of way, it kind of made the media landscape a bit worse because some brands were then like, oh well, if I'm gonna get dinged for having my ad next to, you know, a hate site, I'm just gonna have my ads pulled from anything that could be possibly can you know, read as controversial, even things like covid, you know, and so it really cred of created a problem for how ad dollars were

spent in the media landscape more generally. Is that is that sort of correct? That's correct? What I never anticipated working on this campaign, when you know, when we when we started tweeting at companies, we were very clear that we think that they should look at their ad placement on breite bart because it is um you know, we used very specific descriptors like homophobic, xenophobic, racist, white nationalist, UM.

What we did not realize or anticipate was that the way that that work would be interpreted in the boardroom would be, Oh, these guys are just going after UM content they don't agree with and content that is like so called controversial. Because the boardrooms are filled with mostly white people. The A the ad industry is mostly white guys, and the in the tech industry at the attack industry are mostly white people, so they don't feel comfortable having

conversations about racism or even using that word. So they literally just wopped out racist with the word controversial or offensive or even yikes yikes moments, not yikes, not yeah it's called hate. Oh oh that really that they will do some like I love the like euphemisms for not having to use the word racist. It's a yikes moment.

So check my ads is UM. We started it as a brand safety consultancy two A health companies check their ads to understand where their ads are going to help them identify UM, hate speech and disinformation in their media by and we also, on the other hand, help them to become more intentional about what they want to support, because that's sort of what brands are looking that these days.

There's so many um there's so many reasons that our existing channels are are toxic or brand unsafe or causing trouble in society, that brands and marketers are really starting to explore ways to be UM, be smarter and and and and spend their money in a way that's more

aligned with their with their values. So we're helping brands to define their own rules and define what where the line is when it comes to their media by so that really helps them to start thinking about what they want to support in a way that doesn't feel political.

We want them to be able to have that conversation through a shared language where they but they're able to sit down and say we shouldn't be advertising on a website like this because it's not aligned with you know, this value or um you know or this campaign that we have in place, and to do so in a

way that doesn't make people feel uncomfortable. So we want people to to We want to be able to facilitate those conversations within a company so they can make those decisions ahead of time instead of having to respond to them. You know, when it turns into a massive issue on social media. Nandini is fully a leader in her industry. Her innovative work helps shift culture and build paths for accountability online that anyone with a Twitter account could participate in.

And now she's building on what she learned to refine the way she makes change. None of this would be possible if she had just kept her head down, made herself small, and followed somebody else's plan for her life. After she published her medium Peace, in a tweet, Nott apologized and acknowledged Nandini as a rightful co founder of Sleeping Giants, And now she wants to make sure that other women, you know, there's nothing wrong with one in

credit for your work. What would you say to a woman out there that's listening that you know is quick, keeping your head down, She's doing the grind. She's afraid to step into her power. As you put it, You know, she she wants credit, she wants that title, but she doesn't know where to start, and she's afraid to even to even start that journey. What would you say to

someone like that? I would say that she can start building our own power today by writing I was able to start building my power when I had nothing and nobody, simply by writing a little bit on LinkedIn every day, just a little bit about current events, about how I feel about something that happened, my opinion, my perspective. No one asked, and for a long time, no one cares. But when you do it every day, you demonstrate your knowledge and your insight, You represent what you're capable of.

You show people how you think and how you approach problems, and people do start to pay attention. You do start to build out the people who care, the people who want to engage with you and uh and from there you grow out the you can start building out the relationships that you need to either you know, find your next place, a less toxic place, a place where you can be more powerful and um and at the very

least too to build your personal influence. That was something that really helped me, was just positioning myself as a thought leader, even if it was to no one but me. Right exactly, You just you get used to saying I. That was something that I never did because I thought, who cares? Like, who cares what I think? Right? I don't even care what I think. That was that was

the attitude I had about myself. So just the simple act of saying I this is what I think was quite radical for me, because what you think matters, so what you write matters too. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi? You can re us at Hello at tang godi dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangdi dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was

created by me Bridget Tod. It's a production of I Heart Radio and Unboss creative Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer. Terry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from I heeart Radio, check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.