People are entitled to their own opinions.
That is an ideal our country has been founded on since its conception and will still emphasize as long as it’s around. However, just because everyone has that right, it does not mean we should promote hate speech.
Breitbart News was run by President Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steven Bannon, and now the site acts as the ringleader of far-right news and opinion.
The website has published headlines like “Trannies Whine About Hilarious Bruce Jenner Billboard” and “The Solution to Online Harassment is Simple: Women Should Log Off.”
Both of these are glaring examples that show the website to be hateful and discriminating against many groups of people.
One of the only ways to help put an end to this hate speech and endorsement is to stop funding the website itself. One big source of income is advertising.
Here’s where TCC comes in. Many organizations outsource with advertising agencies that use algorithms and ideal demographics to target people on the websites they visit often or just happen to be on at the time.
With the random algorithms and ad-matching software, it is sometimes impossible to be sure where exactly a specific group’s ad might end up. Safeguards available like blacklisting allow the organization to ban certain websites from displaying their ads.
So, for instance, a business could blacklist any pornographic website because that isn’t deemed brand-appropriate.
Recently, a group calling itself the Sleeping Giants, which The New York Times said is made up of anonymous media professionals, has set out through Twitter to alert companies who might not be aware their ads are showing up on Breitbart. A tweet aimed at TCC informed the school of its ad showing up there.
As of right now, TCC has no plans on blacklisting the site, but that needs to change.
The Sleeping Giants claim on Twitter to have persuaded 1,132 groups to take their ads off of Breitbart. We need to join that group.
TCC isn’t alone. Other colleges and universities such as Duke, Southern Methodist University and Harvard also have had advertisements on display.
To be exact, 70 colleges have agreed to remove their advertisements from the website. Duke was among those to remove its ad, and so did the University of California at Berkeley.
Other big brands that have removed their ads include Aveda, Bed Bath and Beyond and Sephora.
TCC did not know about its advertisement on Breitbart before. But now it does. So the college should do something about it and add the site to the blacklist.
Hate speech that alienates such a large population of students should not be perpetuated and endorsed even if it’s indirect.
Tarrant County College’s own nondiscrimination statement says, “Tarrant County College does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sexual orientation, religion, gender, physical or mental disability, veteran status, or age in its programs and activities.”
With that being the case, TCC should not let the brand be associated with a website that blatantly discriminates against so many different groups of people.
