Like the millions of Americans who watched in horror as a long, contentious, and bigotry-filled campaign season ended with Donald Trump winning his bid for the Oval Office, the group of friends behind Sleeping Giants were feeling, as one of them puts it, pretty “bummed out” in the weeks following Election Day 2016. But after it became clear that former Breitbart executive Steve Bannon would be appointed to a senior position in the Trump administration, they decided to respond by doing what everyone does when they spot something bad in the world: Start tweeting about it.

Relying on a combination of digital media savvy, Google research, and their intuition about major corporations’ fondness for being associated with stuff like this, the friends correctly guessed that “programmatic advertising” was responsible for many of the ads that appear on Breitbart. Rather than manually place digital ads, companies large and small will pay brokers—Google, Amazon, and the like—to place them all over the Internet, irrespective of the destination site’s content. Programmatic advertising is why, for example, a reader who scrolls to the bottom of a Breitbart article might come upon the smiling face of Bernie Sanders, urging them to sign on as a Medicare for All co-sponsor.

Brokers, however, also allow clients to place potential ad locations on a blacklist. All they have to do is ask. Armed with this information, Sleeping Giants began tweeting at companies’ official handles, notifying them of their perhaps-unwitting presence on Breitbart and offering to help fix it. When a community of like-minded users began following suit, Sleeping Giants authored a step-by-step guide to the process, pointedly reminding newbies to phrase their overtures in a “non-offensive” way. Many third-party tweets based on this template end with a cheerful, we’re-all-in-this-together refrain that has, as far as I can tell, developed organically: “@slpng_giants can help!”

Since then, the campaign has welcomed new volunteers into the fold and spawned more than a dozen loosely-affiliated international chapters. And while a few of its members know one another in real life, most have never any of the others in person. A spokesman jokingly likens it to a more genteel version of Reservoir Dogs. “Everyone is really friendly, and we all talk and share information,” he says, “but no one knows each other’s real names.” Not that it’s mattered. Less than a year and a half after Sleeping Giants sent its first screenshot to a Breitbart advertiser, their model of polite, carefully-targeted, crowdsourced activism has resulted in nearly 4,000 companies adding the site to their programmatic advertising blacklists.

To date, the people behind Sleeping Giants have elected to remain anonymous, noting that a few of them work in marketing-related fields in which their off-hours activism might be perceived as creating some kind of conflict of interest. The identities of the people who operate a Twitter handle, at least to them, are far less important than what the community has accomplished together. “We’re kind of just administrators at this point,” he says. “It’s cooler that way.” Though he doesn't say as much, it is also easy to imagine how unmasking the campaign's founders might cause opponents to attack the individuals behind it. Collective anonymity can be a handy defense.

In a strange twist, Sleeping Giants has proven that the simple act of tweeting at brands—at once one of the most common and most reviled practices on the Internet today—can be a startlingly effective form of #Resistance. In the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, as social media campaigns ramp up the pressure on advertisers, sponsors, and other corporate partners to cut ties with the National Rifle Association, we spoke with the campaign to learn more about how they managed to cut the legs out from under Breitbart—and how activists might be able to accomplish something similar with the NRA, too.

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GQ: How did you decide on a mission? Like, among the many racist, sexist, xenophobic, bigoted sites out there, what made you settle on Breitbart?

Sleeping Giants: After the election, we just couldn't believe that the guy who pushed Breitbart's racism and bigotry was going to be in the White House. At the time, we were painfully unaware of everything that goes on at that site. They were using their influence to attack immigrants and women. They were anti-LGBT. They had a “Black Crime” articles tag. It was just gross.

Knowing a bit about digital marketing, we wondered, Okay, who is advertising on this rag? The first name we saw was SoFi, a progressive loan company based in San Francisco. We were like, Why they hell are they advertising on here? That seems wrong. So we set up an account with shitty stock art and an anonymous handle and set screenshots to SoFi and to their CEO. Their CEO got back to us a half-hour later and said, "I had no idea we were on there." And the ad was gone.

We went back on and saw another ad, this time for Warby Parker, or something like that—another company that didn't really seem to fit. Within a week, we had five, six, seven companies remove themselves. At that point, we knew we were on top of a pretty big mountain of shit. [laughs]

It quickly went from a two-week project to our entire lives. A big reason why the movement has remained so successful, though, is crowdsourcing, which was actually sort of an afterthought. Eventually, we realized that we couldn’t do this by ourselves—there were so many ads popping up, and only a few of us. We needed more people. So we put some instructions up on that pinned tweet, and that’s when everything kind of caught fire—and when advertisers started coming down, tens and hundreds at a time.

So much fucking work! But the bigger it's become, the more that parts of it have tailed off, in a way. In the beginning, we were doing so much education. Part of the problem was that advertisers had no idea they were even there, and so we would tweet something, like, "Hey, you're showing up on Breitbart," and people would go insane. "Get the fuck off Breitbart!" We'd have to explain that that isn't how it works—that Google and Facebook place the ads, and that companies don't know about it.

We don't want to add to the outrage too much—it's just not valuable. Now, it's kind of a self-policing community. If someone starts with the outrage, someone else will just say, "Look, we're not about that here." It's a different tone.

Since Parkland, you’ve stated that the campaigns targeting the NRA fall “outside your mission,” but you have criticized Apple, Amazon, Google, Roku, and other platforms that include NRATV in their programming. What made you decide to take this approach?

These platforms all have community standards that are supposed to mean something. But the way in which they're worded is very obtuse, and they give no clear indication about what's acceptable. If you're going to lay down rules, enforce those rules. If not, you're just a message board, and anything goes. Since that’s not how they've set it up, we think they should be more reactive to vile, racist, and sexist comments appearing on their platform.

Those community standards extend to streaming, which is why even though we haven’t gone full-bore at the NRA, we have done some tweeting about NRATV. The NRA pushes racially-charged programming and anti-media propaganda using these streaming services. We think that doing so clearly breaks these platforms’ community standards, and that it violates their terms of service. We don't think that's right.

Our point of view has always been that Breitbart and the NRA can say whatever they want. They can scream it on the street, and they can broadcast it themselves. But it doesn't entitle them to ad dollars, and it doesn't entitle them to a spot on a platform that expressly prohibits that kind of thing.

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Could a counter-movement work? For example, could enterprising members of MAGA Twitter get tens of thousands of people to pressure advertisers into blacklisting, say, the New York Times? How flexible do you think this model is?

Look, nothing is outside the realm of possibility. We think, though, that when the focus is on bigotry and sexism and violence, those are unassailable points. One of the reasons we've been successful is that no one wants to be associated with an article that says that the Confederate flag proclaims a glorious heritage, or that says sorry girls, but the smartest people in the world are men. No brand wants to be next to that.

We get a lot of trolls calling us leftists, and Marxists, and "Soros-funded," and so on—and they can say whatever they want. The First Amendment applies to everyone. If they want to do something like that, they can certainly try. But at least in our minds, the message wouldn't ring true.

How do companies typically react to being the subject of a Sleeping Giants tweet? How do they decide how to respond?

I'm sure they all run the numbers, right? Some of them react emotionally, and that's fine. But they also have to wonder, Okay, how is this going to affect our business? And while there are a lot of people who support the NRA, there are a lot more people who have a problem with kids getting shot in school.

We are critical of companies that come back to us and say something like, "This is just a political thing." No, actually, your ad is next to an article saying that women don't belong in math and science! It’s pretty brutal to say that you’re okay with that! We also have a problem when someone says, “Look, we're not going to advertise on any political sites.” Well, there are a lot of political sites that are valuable from an advertising standpoint that aren’t incredibly divisive! We think it’s a mistake to lump Breitbart to lump in with “political sites” like that.

"Our point of view has always been that Breitbart and the NRA can say whatever they want. But it doesn't entitle them to ad dollars, and it doesn't entitle them to a spot on a platform that expressly prohibits that kind of thing."

Almost every company we've contacted has decided to remove themselves, and when we put that information out there and confirm it on Twitter, people shower them with love—and hopefully business, too. After Kellogg’s dropped Breitbart and got a ton of initial backlash, some people responded by buying cartloads of Kellogg's cereal and taking them to food banks. That felt good.

Given that technology makes it easy for people to learn more about the causes and organizations with which companies partner, what advice would you give to businesses as they make those decisions?

More companies should figure out their internal ethical codes before they start placing media. What do they believe in? What do they want to support? Do they want to support a fair press? If the general idea of ethical advertising is successful, they will be putting a lot more thought into what their money is doing.

I think we're walking up the chain right now—not just us, but in general. Take the NRA, for example. You start with its corporate partnerships, and then you go look at who's spreading the word, and then you go to the banks that are invested in the NRA, and so on. The bigger “get” overall is that more people are becoming more aware of where their money is going—whether from a business, or investment, or advertising, or any other point of view.

What made you decide to adopt such a civil tone when dealing with advertisers?

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Everyone's so pissed off all the time, man! It's just.. exhausting. Anyone can dunk on someone if they want, and every once in a while, it's fun. But people are getting tired of it. We try to be nice instead.

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