Pressure group launches crowdfunding to encourage corporations to stop advertising in ‘hate’ media

Stop Funding Hate aims to raise £50,000 – by Thursday morning it had already raised 5 per cent of that sum

In 2015 the United Nations publicly urged the UK to tackle hate speech in British media, specifically citing an article in The Sun in which migrants were described as 'cockroaches (Stop Funding Hate)

A pressure group whose aim it is to encourage corporations to stop advertising on media outlets that they say encourage hate speech and extremism has launched a crowd-funding campaign to raise awareness and spread support.

Stop Funding Hate launched the campaign earlier this week, which aims to raise £50,000 on Crowdfunder UK. By Thursday morning it had already raised 5 per cent of that sum.

“We’re challenging the hate campaigns of The Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express by encouraging Britain’s best-loved brands to pull their ads,” the group, founded in August 2016, wrote in its funding pitch.

“Now we want to fund our biggest video campaign yet, including high impact advertising where brands and the public will be sure to see it. We also need resources to set ourselves up for the long-term. Help us cover our running costs and we can change the business model of hate.”

“People have for months been asking how they can support us and donate,” Stop Funding Hate’s founder, Richard Wilson, told The Independent.

“That’s why we decided to launch the crowdfunding campaign.”

Stop Funding Hate urges advertisers to rethink their support for right-wing newspapers over what it sees as misleading headlines about child refugees.

This week The Body Shop, owned by L’Oreal, stated on Twitter that it has no plans to advertise with the Daily Mail. In December, the beauty company had a front-page advertisement on the Mail on Sunday.

In the same week, phone and broadband provider Plusnet pulled an advertisement from The Sun in response to social media backlash and criticism from Stop Funding Hate.

In 2015, The United Nations publicly urged the UK to tackle hate speech in British media, specifically citing an article in The Sun in which migrants were described as “cockroaches”.

Last November, Lego said it would stop advertising its products in the Daily Mail, becoming the first major company to agree to the campaigner’s demands.

“Newspaper editors have a strong incentive to run sensationalist anti-migrant headlines: it boosts their readership – and that means they can earn more from advertising,” Stop Funding Hate writes on its website.

“Many of these advertisers have strong ethical stances on other issues: on discrimination in the workplace, on their supply chains, on their role in their communities. But when it comes to choosing which publications they fund with their advertising budgets, their own ethics and values have often been ignored.”

In the US, more than 1,000 companies, including Kellogg’s, BMW, Visa and T-Mobile, have pulled advertising from far-right news outlet Breitbart, according to a database from campaign group Sleeping Giants.

A petition for Amazon to cancel its relationship with the website has also reached almost half-a-million signatures.