Stop Funding Hate
My visit with Richard Wilson, Founder
I just got back from a self-funded trip to London to visit with Richard Wilson, founder of Stop Funding Hate. With the help of saved up airline miles and the kindness of friends with spare bedrooms and dogs in need of walking, I spent a few days chatting with Richard in various spots around London.
Richard and I’d met via zoom about a year ago just as I was beginning this large, qualitative research project that I’m calling: Combatting the Far Right: In the Streets, Online and Around the World. For the past year, I’ve been involving my students in this project by teaching a series of courses on the topic of the far right and digital research methods.
Jessie Daniels' Newsletter is just getting started, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
(Geek alert: we’ve been using a new qualitative data tool called Hey Marvin, recommended to me by anthropologist Mary L. Gray, and it’s a game-changer. If you’ve been using Atlas.ti, NVIVO, or Dedoose, you’re going to want to upgrade to Hey Marvin because it integrates zoom interviews, generates a first-draft transcript, along with codes. And, it stores all that data in an intuitive interface that is easy to navigate. A-MAZ-ING.)
The idea behind the Combatting the Far Right (CTFR) project is to turn the ship of analysis away from focusing on the people creating the violence and dissension (we know enough about them already), and instead, focus on the people who are doing the work of pushing back against these forces. There are several challenges to this work, and perhaps first among these is finding people who are focused on solutions rather than on creating another PDF report that does little to affect real change. That’s what led me to Richard and the work of Stop Funding Hate.
The model Richard and his small team of mostly volunteers are developing is intriguing. The idea is that hateful content is profitable for the tabloid press in the UK and they aim to disrupt that business model. Inspired to stop dehumanization after his sister was killed in the Rwandan genocide, he wrote about in his 2006 book Titanic Express. The target of their work is The Daily Mail, a publication that traffics in anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-trans rhetoric and makes a tidy sum in advertising.
If you understand even a little about the current state of journalism and online advertising works, then you’ll see how their approach works.
Profits are down in journalism across the board and across borders. According to the U.S. Census, newspaper publishers revenue in 2020 was less than half what it was in 2002, dropping from $46.2 billion to $22.1 billion. A 2014 study on UK newspapers found that Most UK newspapers are still profitable, but not as profitable as before the advent of online advertising. Specifically, The Daily Mail and its parent company DMGT have been struggling, with “overall revenue down” reported in 2021.
Online advertisers don’t usually know where their ads end up. The way online advertising works now, a company will spend a wad of cash with a company like Google (but there are other online ad firms, like this one in the UK). Then the ad agency sprays those ads all over the Internet and hopes some of them stick. Never mind for the moment, that ROI on digital ads is notoriously hard to demonstrate and that we may be living in what Tim Hwang calls a Subprime Attention Crisis, but this is the digital landscape we have right now. In this, is an opportunity for disruption.
“Finding a vulnerability in the death star,” is how Richard describes their model. It works like this: if a publication has profit margins of say, 10 percent, then a hit to their advertising revenue of 25 percent could make them change their business model. What Stop Funding Hate does is reach out to the companies who have digital ads that end up on The Daily Mail, usually unbeknownst to them because they’ve bought and “ad package” from some agency. Then, it approaches the companies directly and asks if they intended for their ad to appear next to nasty anti-immigrant content on the tabloid’s website. For example, if Company XYZ is trying to get customers to use their bank, they may alienate potential customers and damage their brand by showing up next to a fear-mongering article. Richard’s analogy to ‘the death star’ is, of course, a reference to the Star Wars franchise and that line is for sure going in the book (with permission). But I thought of a different analogy that speaks to the precarity of the current online advertising apparatus: pulling the last crucial piece out of a Jenga tower and it all comes crashing down.
The results that Stop Funding Hate has gotten from this model are encouraging.
When The Daily Mail switched editors in 2021, The Prospect Magazine reported that this was “understood at least partly to relate to the success of groups such as Stop Funding Hate in convincing advertisers not to appear in the Mail.”
One more thing I appreciate about Stop Funding Hate is that they’re using a community-organizing model that’s more No Pasaran! than PDF. They do this in a few ways, first by encouraging volunteers to become involved and host online workshops to do grassroots education, and then by encouraging people in other locations to adopt their model.
There are certainly limitations to how portable this model is to other countries. One of the things I asked Richard about was the limitations of companies that place a value on “ethical advertising,” and whether there is any equivalent to Chick-Fil-A or Hobby Lobby in the US, two companies that have proudly stood on the side of discrimination. He said, “There is no equivalent to Chick-Fil-A here.”
That may change in England as American far-right rhetoric about the “woke mind virus” continues to be spread by a host of bad actors. But the fact is, right now, in the current context as wretched as it is, Stop Funding Hate is making a real difference.
If you’d like to support the work of Stop Funding Hate, you can make a donation here, you can buy some of their merch over here, and you can sign up for one of their workshops here.