Federal advertising 'blacklist' of websites includes far-right redhat outlets

[Bladewire]

Trump is president and banning government ad spending on sites his base read everyday!



"Right-wing outlets The Rebel and Breitbart, as well as the extreme-right website Daily Stormer are among more than 3,000 websites on an internal "blacklist" to ensure the federal government's digital advertisements do not appear on sites promoting hate, porn, gambling and other subjects deemed unacceptable."

Federal advertising 'blacklist' mostly of far-right "news" outlets

The expansive list also includes conservative news sites like the Drudge Report, the Washington Times, Gateway Pundit and the National Review, as well as many non-political websites, such as TMZ, Esquire and Cosmopolitan.

CBC News obtained a copy of a recent version of the list, dating from June, via an Access to Information request.

There are 3,071 websites on the current blacklist, which is maintained and regularly updated for the federal government by Cossette Media, the agency hired to place Ottawa's ads online, on radio and TV and in newspapers. The vast majority of federal ad dollars is now directed to the web.

The released version of the blacklist is non-alphabetical and uncategorized, with no information about the date a website was added nor about the reasons for its inclusion.

"It has evolved consistently since it was established [in 2012], and continues to evolve as the internet landscape and industry trends change and technology advances," Nicolas Boucher, spokesperson for Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC), said in an email.

"Categories have expanded, and sensitivities evolve over time."

Boucher, whose department co-ordinates federal advertising, declined to respond when asked about the reason for inclusion of particular websites, including some that appear innocuous.

But sites can be blacklisted because they "have consistently underperformed in advertising campaigns," he noted. "Sites may also be excluded if there have been comments or complaints about the content."

Breitbart added in December

Breitbart, the U.S.-based ultra-right website to which Steve Bannon recently returned after his departure as U.S. President Donald Trump's chief strategist, was added to the list last December after complaints.

Steve Bannon is hoist with his own petard: Keith Boag
The move followed a social media campaign by Sleeping Giants, a shadowy activist group that emerged on Facebook and Twitter last November and pressed corporations to pull their ads from Breitbart, which also runs several affiliated websites.

Sleeping Giants focused on the Canadian government after an ad for the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission appeared on the site for three days, Nov. 28-30, 2016, before being pulled. Previously, ads for Statistics Canada and Employment and Social Development Canada had also appeared there.

And in May this year, Sleeping Giants launched a campaign urging corporations to pull ads from Canadian ultra-right site The Rebel.

The Rebel Media's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week
Boucher would not say when The Rebel was added to the blacklist, or why. (The outlet received a letter of support from Environment Minister Catherine McKenna last October when it applied for media accreditation at a climate conference in Morocco, in a press-freedom controversy.)

A Jan. 4 ministerial briefing note for PSPC outlines "brand safety measures" for determining which websites are forbidden when government digital ads are purchased via networks such as the Google Display Network.

"For digital advertising that is purchased programmatically ? that is, by a computer, based on a series of ...

Full story at the link above

[beerptrol]

In before the chumpanzees crying about their freedom of speech and how liberal companies/government should be made to spend their money advertising on red hat sites and not doing so is censorship

and
How they didn't ban any of those fake news msm sites...cnn...msnbc

[Barry-xlovecam]

GFY is not on that list?

[rowan]

Originally Posted by beerptrol

In before the chumpanzees crying about their freedom of speech and how liberal companies/government should be made to spend their money advertising on red hat sites and not doing so is censorship

Why would they care about blacklisting of websites in Canada?

[Bladewire]