Sleeping Giants is a mysterious group that has no address, no organizational structure and no officers. At least none that are publicly known. All of its leaders are anonymous
.. It aims to drive advertisers away from Breitbart. “We’re trying to defund bigotry,” the spokesman says.
.. Sleeping Giants’ basic approach is to make Breitbart’s advertisers aware that they are, in fact, Breitbart advertisers. Many apparently don’t know this, given that Web ads are often bought through third-party brokers, such as Google and Facebook.
.. Sleeping Giants’ database lists nearly 2,900 companies that have declared Breitbart off limits since November — an astonishing figure
.. “What they’re doing is a very dangerous thing,” says Alexander Marlow, Breitbart’s editor in chief. “They are trying to impose corporate censorship and corporate segregation on us, and they’re doing it anonymously.”
.. “It really happened as a reaction to Steve Bannon’s rise,” the spokesman says. “We weren’t familiar with Breitbart at the time and were obviously pretty shocked at the articles. . . . To be honest, we weren’t familiar with [other conservative] sites,” so those weren’t even considered, he says.
.. Facebook and Google — two of the biggest Web-ad distributors — have never responded to Sleeping Giants, which wants the two companies to impose a blanket ban on serving ads to Breitbart.
.. Even if Sleeping Giants persuaded every advertiser to avoid Breitbart, it seems unlikely to threaten the site’s existence or even impose severe financial hardship. Breitbart is directly funded, and partially owned, by Robert Mercer,
.. “No one [in the media business] has said anything to defend Breitbart,” he says. “No one is standing up and saying, ‘This is about Breitbart now. But it could be about us tomorrow.’ ”