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    Incendiary Republican ads boasting of ‘hunting’ rivals raise fears of violence

    Incendiary Republican ads boasting of ‘hunting’ rivals raise fears of violenceAds like Eric Greitens’, in which he says ‘get a Rino hunting permit’, could lead people to rationalize violence – experts Before the Capitol attack on 6 January, Robert Pape, a University of Chicago professor, had studied political violence around the world but not in the United States because there had not been much to examine, he said.Pape worries that could soon change because of politicians like Eric Greitens, a former Navy Seal from Missouri running for Senate, who recently released an advertisement in which he racked a shotgun and led a team of armed men as they stormed a house to hunt more moderate members of his own party, know derisively as Rinos, as in “Republicans in name only”.“Join the Maga crew,” Greitens, a former Republican governor, declares in the ad. “Get a Rino hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”But such messaging won’t save lives and instead could lead people to rationalize committing violence against those with whom they have political disagreements, according to Pape and other political scientists.“This is important, not because [Greitens] himself will necessarily do any violent act, but what is happening is that the more there is community support for violence, this lowers the threshold for volatile actors to act violently,” said Pape, who directs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats.Public figures on the left – and a smattering on the right – condemned the ad, and Facebook removed the video for violating its violence and incitement policies.This is not the first time that Greitens has released such a campaign video. In April, he posted one on Twitter in which he and Donald Trump Jr, fired rifles at a range. In the accompanying text he wrote, “Striking fear into the hearts of liberals, Rinos, and the fake media.”Greitens leads the Republican primary for Senate, according to recent polls, in spite of allegations that he committed campaign violations and was abusive to his wife, who has since divorced him, their children and a woman with whom he had an affair.Nor is he alone among Republicans in producing incendiary advertisements featuring guns. More than 100 television ads this year from the party’s candidates and supportive groups have included guns as talking points or visual motifs, according to the New York Times.In the Republican Senate primary in Pennsylvania, Dave McCormick, who later narrowly lost, ran an ad in which he recalled his experiences with various guns and said, “I approve this message to protect the second amendment because that’s what guarantees the rest of it.”But Greitens’ spot differs from other Republican candidates’ videos in that it shows him and the other men targeting political opponents rather than, for example, shooting an inanimate object, the political scientists said.“What I do not recall seeing before is actually verbalizing that the target is other people,” said Erika Franklin Fowler, a professor of government at Wesleyan University, and an author of a report on guns in recent political advertising.The video also differed from other incendiary advertisements in that Greitens says people in his own party should be targeted.“Republicans are competing against each other for the nomination there, so it’s not unusual to hear within-party criticism, but I’ve never heard such vitriol against their own party from a candidate, let alone in an ad that was presumably vetted by several people in the campaign,” Nathan Kalmoe, professor of political communication at Louisiana State University and author of Radical American Partisanship, stated in an email.The political scientists also expressed concern over the video because he is among the Republican candidates who promote the false conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was rigged against Donald Trump.“It’s of extreme concern to me that fairly mainstream Republicans have jumped on that wagon in order to win in primaries,” said David Romano, a Missouri State University professor who researches and teaches about political violence. “If [Republicans] think it’s rigged again in the next presidential election, then it’s not a far step to much more widespread violence, like we saw on January 6.”Pape, who has studied conflicts in the Middle East and eastern Europe, worries that such messaging could lead to similar violence in the United States. He traced his concern to events such as the May mass shooting in Buffalo. The alleged perpetrator targeted Black people and cited the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that non-white individuals are being brought to America to replace white voters and achieve an agenda.“There is every reason to believe our country will follow the trajectory of other countries and societies where this kind of rhetoric is in the mainstream,” said Pape.Pape has called for a “public conversation about the consequences of community support for violence in the mainstream”.He testified at a Senate judiciary committee earlier this month on the “metastasizing” domestic terrorism threat. Pape said he saw it as a positive step that a bipartisan group of senators held such a hearing and “were not at each other’s throats”.“They didn’t fully agree by any stretch,” Pape said. “There are differences, but they were trying to think through these issues of political violence in the mainstream, and it’s a challenge because this is not a problem that’s been around for 30 years.”TopicsRepublicansAdvertisingUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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    Group aims to strip Fox News of ad revenue over ‘fueling next insurrection’

    Group aims to strip Fox News of ad revenue over ‘fueling next insurrection’Check My Ads targeting news channel website at a time when its prominent hosts are downplaying January 6 insurrection After two years which have seen Fox News lunge even further towards the right wing of US politics, the news channel may now start to suffer the consequences, with the launch of a campaign to strip the news channel’s Foxnews.com website of advertising revenue.Check My Ads, an organization run by two former marketing executives, launched its campaign to target Fox News in early June, accusing the news channel and its website of “working overtime to fuel the next insurrection”.More than 40,000 people signed up in the first five days, forming an increasingly powerful lobbying group which aims to get ad exchanges to drop Foxnews.com.The campaign comes at a time when prominent Fox News hosts are downplaying the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington DC as “a forgettably minor outbreak” of “mob violence”, continuing to dabble in election conspiracy theories, and have most recently begun to brand school teachers and drag performers as “groomers”.Check My Ads was founded by two marketing executives who have a deep understanding of how advertising appears on websites. Despite its record of dabbling in misinformation, adverts for companies like Walgreens and Optimum can still be found on Foxnews.com. The adverts are largely placed there, Atkin said, by ad exchanges, which handle the distribution of adverts for advertising agencies.“Foxnews.com benefits enormously from being a part of the global advertising society. Foxnews.com receives ads from blue chip brands, which gives incredible legitimacy to the lies that they are publishing. That brand equity is intrinsically valuable,” Atkin said.A number of large companies have already stopped advertising on the Fox News after various misdeeds by its TV hosts over the years. But ads for Walgreens and the like still pop up on the Fox News website, despite the obvious link between the two entities. Whereas viewers of the TV channel might see adverts for relatively little known companies, like Nutrisystem and Balance of Nature, visitors to the website see the names of big companies, which can suggest to the reader that this is a respected website.“When Fox is plugged into that ads supply chain, it gives them the legitimacy of a real news outlet, when in fact they are publishing disinformation regularly that leads to real-world violence.”In the two weeks following the 2020 election, Fox News cast doubt on, or pushed conspiracy theories about the result 774 times, according to Media Matters for America, a watchdog group. That helped to fuel anger among Donald Trump’s supporters – rage which came to the surface on 6 January, when hundreds of Trump’s adherents stormed the US Capitol.Since the Capitol attack, Fox News hosts have rubbished the idea that the storming of the building – done in an attempt to stop Joe Biden being declared president – was an insurrection. Fox News viewers have instead heard that it was a minor skirmish, one which may even have been orchestrated by the government.That’s why, Atkin said, Check My Ads is determined to trim the network’s wings.“Advertisers have been crystal clear that they do not want to sponsor violence. And we all saw what happened on January 6. It’s not just violence, this was the attempted overthrow of the government. This is world-scale political violence,” Atkin said.Ad exchanges vet certain websites before placing adverts on behalf of their clients. If a website meets their criteria – and the criteria often include statements that the website does not endorse or encourage harassment or bullying – then ads are placed on them.But the exchanges, Atkin said, are “not checking their inventory” thoroughly enough, and websites like Fox News are slipping through the cracks.Check My Ads’ campaign works by finding which ad exchanges are active on a given website, which is easy enough to do: typing https://www.foxnews.com/ads.txt brings up the list.The innovative part of Check My Ads is how the organization has set up a way for people to send swift, concise complaints to those ad exchanges. The organization sends out email templates to those who sign up, which they can send on to ad exchanges, flagging sites where the exchange has placed ads on sites which are incompatible with the exchanges’ stated policy.“The ad exchanges promise in their legal documentation in these policies that are available online to anyone: ‘We only work with premium publishers and we will never work with websites that publish election disinformation, the promotion of real world violence, all of these other things,” Atkin said.“That is providing a sense of false confidence to advertisers. Because as we know, these ad exchanges are still sending ads and money and data to the propaganda outlets that are doing our society the most harm, and who are the most brand unsafe.”In a statement, Fox News said: “Fox News Media strongly supports the first amendment and is proud to lead the industry in featuring more dissenting viewpoints on the major issues facing the country than our cable news competitors, which is why we attract the most politically diverse audience in television news.”The campaign isn’t going to financially cripple Fox News. Some 95% of Fox’s revenue comes from cable contracts, as opposed to advertising, NPR reported this year. But Atkin believes the campaign, as well as removing ads which lend legitimacy to Fox News, could also prevent Foxnews.com from collecting data on its users so that they can be later targeted with specific content – potentially anti-democratic content.Fox News is the most-watched cable news channel in the US, and is a huge opponent. But Check My Ads are hopeful that they have found a foolproof way to at least take away some of its power.“The fact is that the advertising industry, in general, has said one thing and it has done another,” she said.“We are opening the conversation up for everyone who wants to say enough is enough.”TopicsFox NewsAdvertisingTV newsTelevision industryUS Capitol attacknewsReuse this content More

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    The Guardian view on Facebook and democracy: real and present danger | Editorial

    In every political debate since Facebook began to dominate democracy, the company has placed itself on the wrong side of history. The social media firm cannot be reformed from within because its business model profits from hosting bomb-throwing circuses of hate, humbug and hogwash. The platform harvests users’ personal data to algorithmically recommend content but […] More