Democracy Hero: Nandini Jammi

 

Meet progressive Nandini Jammi, scourge of fascist disinformation:

When Elon Musk reinstated far-right influencer and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s account on X on Sunday night, digital marketer and activist Nandini Jammi sprang into action. She posted on X to alert her followers to his return and began monitoring his posts.

“We’ve been working on alerting advertisers to the two platforms where Alex Jones primarily lives, Rumble and Twitter,” Jammi said, using X’s former name. “Alex Jones has proven to be a dangerous conspiracy theorist, and Twitter is reopening a channel for him to earn ad revenue.”

Jammi was part of the effort that successfully de-platformed Jones in 2018 and led to his banning from major social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Spotify. She waged a widespread social media campaign imploring the public to contact the platforms directly and pressure them to remove him. That same year, Jammi helped get Jones removed from PayPal by writing directly to the company, asking it to review his use of the platform. Shortly after, he was banned there too.

Far-right content creators such as Jones, who commingle conservative commentary and conspiracy theories with advertising, have become common on social media. While traditional news outlets have been slow to adopt the personality-driven model that now dominates the internet, conservative media have embraced it for years, delivering news with a partisan slant that generates outrage, attracts large audiences — and turns a profit.  [snip]

In 2016, Jammi noticed that advertising on the conservative news site Breitbart relied heavily on programmatic advertising. So she began alerting advertisers when their marketing appeared next to hate speech and disinformation. Jammi soon partnered with Matt Rivitz, a copywriter and marketer in San Francisco who was doing similar work, to launch Sleeping Giants, an activist organization dedicated to demonetizing right-wing extremist news sites.

In 2020, she decided to lean into these efforts full time. Working with Claire Atkin, a fellow marketer who was worried about how online advertising enabled disinformation, Jammi co-founded Check My Ads, a nonprofit focused on accountability in ad tech. She also has become an influencer herself, building audiences on Twitter, TikTok and LinkedIn, where she catalogues her demonetization campaigns.  [snip]

Jammi uses social media to draw attention to advertisers whose marketing appears on sites controlled by far-right creators. She also files complaints with industry accountability boards, including the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), an organization that targets fraudulent and criminal digital advertising and whose membership includes Facebook, Google and other major brands...

Jammi's successful efforts to de- monetize the fascist bad actors in social media are the result, she says, of her group's understanding of how the bad actors' business model works, and because "we have the time and patience to dismantle them, one piece at a time.”  We need more people like Nandini Jammi, who is doing yeoman's work in defense of our democracy.

There's more on her work worth reading at the link.

[Ed.:  We hope to make this "Democracy Hero" an occasional feature of the blog.  Feel free in comments to suggest candidates who might be flying under the radar, but are making a difference.]

(Photo:  Nandini Jammi / Micah E. Wood for the Washington Post, assisted by Raúl Fernando)