September 15, 2020 • 48 mins
Nandini Jammi co founded Sleeping Giants, one of the most influential activist campaigns of the Trump era. But she was almost completely left out of the movement she helped build.
Nandini's Medium piece: https://medium.com/@nandoodles/im-leaving-sleeping-giants-but-not-because-i-want-to-d9c4f488642
Wired piece on Check My Ads: https://www.wired.com/story/she-helped-wreck-the-news-business-heres-her-plan-to-fix-it/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
There are No Girls on the Internet. As a production
of I Heart Radio and Unbossed Creative, I'm Bridget Todd
and this is there are no girls on the Internet.
Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy. There's no hiring
bias against women in tech. They just suck at interviews.
(00:26):
Will be rather your child have feminism or cancer? All
of these completely messed up headlines where actual headlines of
stories published on the far right website bright bark dot com,
known for publishing misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist articles, dangerous conspiracy theories,
and deliberately misleading stories. It's also one of the most
(00:48):
important sites in the era of Trump. Their former chairman,
Steve Bannon even served as Trump's chief strategist. And where
there's an online website, there's brands keeping that website afloat
by giving them need to run ads on that website.
But one group went on a mission to make that
kind of racism, misogyny, and hate speech unprofitable. Sleeping Giants
(01:10):
became one of the most influential activist organizations of the
Trump era. Their strategy involved urging their members to tweet
screenshots of brands running ads on websites that support and
published hate speech, asking if those sites match their values
and urging them to pull their ads. In doing so,
they learned that oftentimes reputable brands have no idea what
(01:31):
sites their ads run on. Sleeping Giants was run anonymously
to create the impression that it was run by more
than just two people. After the conservative news outlet Daily
Caller published a piece out in one person behind Sleeping Giants,
Matt Rivets, he and his family faced death threats. Later,
Matt was profiled in a New York Times piece alongside
(01:52):
Sleeping Giants co founder Nandini Jammy. Sleeping Giants was so
successful that they contributed to Breitbart seeing drop and ad revenue.
They also contributed to a broader conversation about how reputable
brands are funding extremism by spending ad money on websites
that published hate speech. So this should be a success
(02:13):
story right. In July, Nandini published a scathing piece on
medium saying that while she believes she was working with
Man as a partner, he gaslighted her out of the
movement they built together. While they're working, relationships started on
a good note. Matt began taking high profile speaking engagements
and obscuring her role in their work, eventually erasing her altogether.
(02:35):
She writes, I want to share with you my journey
was sleeping giants while taking credit matters, And while you
must fight for yourself as hard as you fight for
your cause, I want to show you how a woman
of color almost disappeared from the movement she built, and
what you can achieve when you refuse to follow the
rules your white male leader sets for you. I hope
other brilliant women of color and marginalized folks see yourselves
(02:58):
in me and don't wait as long as I did.
The stakes are too high for you to disappear. Now,
Nandini is done letting her voice be left out of
the narrative. So how did you get started in this work?
In November, I was working as as head of growth
for a tech startup and I went to visit breitbar
(03:21):
dot com for the first time after the elections. Just
like everyone else, I was trying to figure out what
happened and what we're dealing with here, and the first
thing I noticed was ads for some of the biggest
companies in the world on this website. You know, we've
been hearing a lot about how it was putting out
(03:44):
pat speech and you know, misinformation and big stories and
all that stuff. But no one had ever really talked about, um,
the ads and the ads are how that website makes money.
So I'm no genius. I just I had like run
Google ad campaign like once a couple of months before that,
(04:04):
and I had been quite particular about where my ads
were going. I was I was curious and interested in
making sure they were appearing in uh in sort of
reputable places on the Internet. And so the first thing
I thought of was, you know the site placements. You know,
the the marketers wore running their campaigns are not looking
(04:25):
at their site placements. And all we have to do
is get these um get these folks to add brighte
bart dot com to their exclusion list. If they do that,
then brighte bart will no longer make money. Like it
was kind of like a crazy idea because there are
(04:47):
so many companies who have Google ads, like possibly millions UM,
and the idea was to get all of them to
one by one to drop to drop right part. So UM,
I I wrote a little I wrote a Medium post
and hoped for it to go viral. UM where basically
(05:08):
sort of outlined this crack pot idea where I was like,
we should all just go into our Google ads added
to our exclusion list and then Breitbart won't receive our
money anymore and then they'll go out of business. And UM.
While that piece didn't go viral, the concept of tweeting
at a company, which is something that I did as
(05:29):
while I tweeted out at like Old maybe that was
the first at I saw UM and letting them know
that their ad is funding uh this hateful website was
UM was something that that took off someone uh, someone
else on the other side of the country, my my
partner who became my partner UM had the same idea.
(05:49):
We we sort of went into business in that sense
in uh, in terms of reaching out to companies and
asking them to check their ads and make sure that
they have bright Bart on their on their exclusion list.
And it just kind of took off from there. So
from you writing this piece urging these brands to to
(06:11):
block you know, ad spins on bright Bart, this is
how you first got connected with Matt. Matt reached out
to you from this piece and thought we should work together.
How did this How did your relationship with Matt and
Sleeping Giants come to be. So I wrote this piece
on I believe it was November, and then by the
next day I had he had like tweeted at me,
(06:34):
same awesome article. We're doing the same thing. We should
you know, UM, you should join us? And I was
like super excited to see that someone else had the
same idea. We moved very quickly from d MS to
email to phone. UM. Turns out like we just have
a lot in common. We're both copyriters, UM, were both
(06:55):
originally from Maryland. UM, and and yeah, he seems really cool,
so I wanted too. Of course they wanted to work together. UM.
I think like for me, working joining forces meant that
we were like partners. UM. He had just started Sleeping
Giants as an account a week before, and it was
(07:16):
it was still nothing, you know, there was maybe a
couple of dozen, maybe a couple hundred followers. UM. What
we decided to do was I would run the Facebook page.
So we started up with Facebook page, which I um
became responsible for, and he continued to learn the Twitter account.
And there was no like formal agreement or anything like
(07:40):
that because we never imagined that it would turn into anything.
So we were just like al right, like it was
just taking it one day at a time, flying by
the seat of our pants, kind of a deal. Nondini
and Matt hit on something big. By harnessing the power
of collective social media users to pressure brands out of
funding hate you were having a real impact. They got
(08:02):
thousands of brands like A T and T, BMW, Visa, Lift,
and Warby Parker to stop running ads on Breitbart. Steve
Bannon was even recorded talking about Sleeping Giants at a
dinner in two thousand eighteen. When I left in to
takeularly campaign, we were going to make like eight million
dollars three cans flow that after we won UM. This
(08:24):
group called Sleeping Giants a group of technics. They literally
stripped out. They went to the thirty five exchanges that
sell the ads, so the ad revenues dropped like nineties.
They even got Breitbart so mad that after Kellogg's pulled
their ads, Breitbart tried to organize an embarrassingly unsuccessful counterboycott,
(08:44):
which Kellogg said had no discernible impact on their sales.
After it was revealed that Fox News is Bill O'Reilly
settled five different sexual harassment suits Sleeping giants pressured brands
to stop advertising on a show. In a week's time,
the O'Riley factor I lost more than half of its
advertisers and Bill O'Reilly went on vacation and never returned.
(09:06):
What were some of the successes that you all had
with Sleeping Giants that you were really proud of? Oh
my god, we did We did so much. Um. I
mean there was just a daily brind of of getting
ads to drop we I mean just the first few months,
the first few months of this campaign was every day, um,
(09:30):
you know, a couple of dozen brands or whatever would
would drop right Bart. Sometimes it would be like really
big ones. So our first big win was Kelloggs. That
was like that resulted in uh, bright Bart starting a
campaign called I think it was like dump Kelloggs or something,
(09:51):
and it was it completely backfired and think they were
like Kelloggs, Kelloggs doesn't support our uh you know brighte
Bart readers, so we're going we're gonna We're gonna dump
Kellogg's in the sink or something like that. It was
so stupid, um, but it gave us our first international headlines,
so that was really cool. Um. But yeah, the first
(10:11):
the first couple of months was just like just like
every every so often, some big brand would come out
and be like, yeah, we're not we don't support the ship,
and then um, after a while, we we felt like
we could, you know, start working on other things. The
first time we moved out of the sort of grew
(10:32):
out of the breitbartwork was when we decided to target
Bill O'Reilly's advertisers. Bill O'Reilly had been sexually harassing his
colleagues in the workplace for um a period of decades,
and The New York Times reported on it. We were like, well,
this really does this fits into our our mission statement
(10:53):
of making bigotry and sexism unprofitable, and we felt like
this is something we could take on. So we um,
we decided to contact Bill O'Reilly advertisers using the same
exactmo that we did with breite bar, just you know,
presenting them with the information and letting them make their
own decision. And Bill O'Reilly lost dozens of advertisers, and
(11:18):
a couple of months later he was on spring break
and or an unplanned vacation or whatever planned vacation heavy
scare quotes around that, I know, right, Yeah, and then
he was he was gone, and they were like, wow,
we were really onto something and um, and then we
went on to uh target Tucker Carlson's advertisers. He's lost
(11:43):
over I believe eight advertisers over the past two years
that we've been working on that. Um. His show is
basically uh unprofitable. It's one of the highest rated shows
on television. It just doesn't bring in any money. Yeah.
Just as a side note, one of my day jobs
involves working with a feminist activist group and we've targeted
(12:03):
Tucker Carlson over the years. And I don't know what
the deal is, but it's like that guy just keeps
hanging on. We can't we can't seem to get him
out of here. I think it's a lot of personal spite,
to be honest, because after we got we got there,
there was one advertiser, um who uh there their their
language learning app called Babel, and they put out quite
(12:26):
the blistering statement on their Tucker Carlson ads. UM. They
were sort of caught, uh caught unawares, and they responded
to our tweet saying, uh, this is uh We're so sorry.
We never um, you know, we're disappointed that our ads
showed up on Tucker Carlson. We find his rhetoric to
(12:47):
be repugnant, and that just triggered them. Um, they released
I think their first statement specifically calling us out. Um
it was us Media Matters and move on dot Org
and it was actually, I mean, I was very proud
of that. I mean, we're just two people running an
account in our spare time. So I felt like I
(13:12):
felt pretty proud of proud of ourselves. Then you should
definitely feel so proud of the work that you accomplished
with Sleeping Giants, even though it you know, you should,
no one can take that away from you. That those
are huge winds and also huge, you know, culture changing moments.
You know this idea that, yeah, brands do have a
responsibility to be a little bit choosy about with their
(13:34):
money goes. We should be pressuring brands to open their
eyes to where they spend their money. Like, that's a
huge cultural shift that I don't think existed before your work.
So you should definitely feel very, very proud and accomplished
about that. Thank you. So when did things start to
feel not so good working with Man on Sleeping Giants? Yeah,
so we had a really good relationship from the beginning. UM,
(13:59):
he was very nice to me and UM, and I
also I admired him a lot, and I UM, I
never imagined that there would ever be problems because it
was like we're we're both here every day putting in
the work, and UM and we I think there was
a lot of mutual respect. At least that's what it
(14:20):
felt like. When Matt realized that he was about to
be docked by the Daily Pollar, he went to The
New York Times to sort of get get ahead of
the story, and during that time asked me whether I
would like to be interviewed for the story. And I
guess I I mean I when he said that, I
think I assumed that I was being asked as a partner.
(14:44):
I spoke to the reporter. I told her, UM, you
know how I was involved in all the stuff that
we were doing, and you know a little bit of
background detail on on how he worked. And she asked
me if I was UM. She asked me what my
title was and I said co found under and then
she was like great. And then she comes back the
next day and does a little fact check in and UM,
(15:06):
and she's like, by the way, your partner said that
you are not a co founder, and I was like, oh, okay,
And I didn't want to make a big deal out
of it, so I didn't. I was like, just go
with whatever he says. But UM. That was sort of
the first indicator that something was off UM. And then
after that, my uh, you know, the story came out,
(15:29):
and my partner went on to take interviews with uh,
sort of high profile outlets like Platsy America with Carra Squsher,
spoke with Katie Kurig. And it was after his interview
with Adweek that I became concerned about UM, about everything
(15:52):
because he uh, he had called himself UM. He was
positioning himself as co founder, which was fined by me.
But in that article, I was positioned or portrayed as UM,
one of the individuals helping him run the accounts. So
at that point I called a meeting and I said, hey, listen,
I don't want to be portrayed as your helper or
(16:12):
your assistant. It's important that I UM that I'm also
portrayed as a leader, because you know, I have been
involved in this work for the whole time, and I
realized that I'm in a really unique position like both
of us were both in a very unique position to
(16:33):
be able to influence the advertising industry. And I want
to be able to speak at conferences and events, and
I want to be present at the table when some
of these big decisions are being made. And that's why
it's important to me to have a title. UM. So
I you know, we had that discussion and he said, UM,
(16:54):
I completely understand. Let's get you a title. You can
call yourself, UM, you know, whatever you want, obviously not founder.
I'm a founder, so you can call yourself, you know,
come up with any So I said, how about founding organizer?
And he agreed to that. So that is UM, That's
what I called myself for about a year. During that time,
(17:15):
he he continued to position himself as founder, of course,
and was able to leverage that too, UM to get
invited to big conferences. Uh you know, I don't know,
for example, south By Southwest and UM Advertising Week and
so on. And I just kind of felt like I
(17:37):
was flailing. I didn't really have an opportunity to um
to you know, to to speak at anything like that,
because I mean I didn't have a title, and b
I didn't have any contacts in the industry. I truly
was sort of cast out on my own again, like
advertising isn't really my world. I don't have connections that
(18:00):
industry I worked in, like the tech startup scene. It's
a totally different world. So UM, so it was. It was.
It was frustrating I couldn't get to where I wanted
to be. So what I did was I asked him
for I basically asked him for the scraps. I was like,
can I like, would you mind telling me about some
(18:21):
of these conferences that you're going to. I would love
to come along. I would like to be your plus one. Um,
you know, we can work the room together, we can
meet more people together. UM. You know. I was always
really careful about I don't want to steal your thunder.
I don't want the attention. I just want to be
working in the background. UM two, I don't know to
to to make something happen. And um and he would
(18:46):
you know, there was there was a power differential there
because he this is his industry, and he's older than me,
and he knows more people than me, and he would
bring that up quite frequently in the calls that we had. UM.
I was sort of outlining my issues, so he never
really um, you know, he'd always say, yeah, sure I
(19:06):
will you know, I'll let you know, i'll give you
I'll give you a shout if these if these things happened,
But he never did that. There was a couple of
other things that concerned me. I didn't have any access
to the general Inquiries email, just like I just didn't
know what was coming into into the organization, Like was
(19:29):
he receiving media opportunities there um or opportunities to speak,
private consulting opportunities. These were the kinds of things that
weren't coming to me necessarily. Um he was asking me too.
He had asked me to send all press requests to
him because that would help us stay on message. So
(19:51):
you don't want too many people speaking to the press.
I thought that was a little weird because you know,
I was writing the Facebook account pletely independently. It's not
like I was getting permission from him before I wrote
post or anything like that. So it's not like I
would model the message because I know what the message is.
I write the message every day. I don't think I
(20:13):
just I don't like I'm not involved in anything related
to the merch shop. I don't know how much money
is being made. I don't know how it's been spent um.
When I asked for access to that, he said, you're
just gonna have to trust me, And yeah, I didn't know.
I didn't I didn't know what to do with that.
(20:34):
We'll be right back, let's get right back into it.
As Matt's public profile grew, Nandini's role in Sleeping Giants
was obscured. As she writes in her medium piece on Twitter,
Matt began to replace what was once a collective we
(20:56):
with I and my The work I had done with
sleep Giants was also appearing on his conference bio. The
vagueness that once helped us look like a mysterious group
bigger than we were was now being claimed solely by him.
I didn't have the media attention or connections that Matt did.
I wasn't forty five white, and I certainly didn't know
anybody in advertising. I was young, unknown, and invisible. It's
(21:22):
difficult for me to hear about Nundini's experience with Sleeping Giants.
I certainly know what it's like to be passed over
for being credited or compensated for my work, and if
you're a woman, especially a woman of color, you probably
know what that feels like too. I've avoided speaking up
because I didn't want to seem like a bragger or
someone who couldn't share the spotlight, or worse, someone who
was only interested in accolades. And in our deeply sexist culture,
(21:47):
is there anything more shameful than being a woman who
wants success? And it's especially tricky when you're working for
social change. The implication of being that we should all
be doing the work just because we care about making change,
not be because we want credit. But this line of
thinking can actually be kind of a trap that keeps
us from taking what's ours while our winds are claimed
(22:08):
by somebody else. You're not an attention seeker for wanting
to be acknowledged for your work. One thing that I
hear time and time again is why it's important to
get credit. I feel like people really need to understand
that it's not about fame and fortune and the limelight. Unfortunately,
the way that it works in the in many tech
(22:28):
industries is if you don't have a title, or if
you don't if you're not able to point to something
and say yeah, I did that, you're not going to
get invited to the conference, You're not going to get
invited to speak, You're not going to get you know,
the consulting opportunity, You're not going to be able to
build up your platform to be able to have a
bigger footprint to do the kind of work and make
(22:49):
the kind of change that you want to make. And
so when women, particularly women of color, advocate for themselves
to get the title, to get the credit, it's not
because we're fame hungry, you know, attention hungry, you know,
spotlight hogs. It's because if we don't have those things,
we're not going to be able to have the kind
of impact that we want to be able to have.
(23:11):
And so I think that, I mean, I guess I
know that I have often felt a little skittish about
asking for a title or because I don't want to
look like I'm trying to, you know, be a fame
a fame hug or something, when in reality, it's just
how it's just the nature of how a lot of
these businesses work. But I mean, you said it, that's
(23:32):
exactly right. I was so afraid of looking like for
being perceived as someone who just wanted attention that I
tried to sidestuff that issue by uh by denying my
self credit and by sort of actively staying away from
the titles that would have given me the power I
needed as a co founder. When I finally made that
(23:55):
shift from a nonsense title founding organizer doesn't mean anything.
It's like assistant to the regional manager. Um. When I
made that shift, uh, I just I found that people
responded to me differently. I found that I took myself
(24:17):
more seriously. UM. It was really eye opening to me
to see how how important titles are for people who
are not traditionally viewed as leaders in the society. UM.
I almost underestimated myself, Like how I guess I didn't
(24:40):
realize how the how the world sees me that was.
That was something that I kind of learned the hard
way the world. Uh. You know, despite the fact that
I was good at what I do, that I had
demonstrated my my abilities, I people looked at me and
didn't see me as a leader. They a lot, I'm
sure a lot of people still don't. UM. So, really
(25:01):
claiming that title is one of the most important things
that you can do. And I don't want anyone to
think that um that doing that is is some kind
of of making a bee line for the fame and
fortune or the glory of it all. Nandini decided that
she was going to stop playing by the rules Matt
set for her, the rules that allowed him to grow
(25:23):
his public profile while she went't forgotten and overlooked the
rules that allowed Matt to fly to France to accept
the prestigious Cans Lion Award, essentially the Oscars of the
creative industry on behalf of the organization they created together
without even telling her. So when did you decide I
am going to claim this title for myself. I'm going
(25:44):
to walk in walk in this title and walk in
this purpose. And I don't care what Matt thinks. It
was after. It was after he deemed me a picture
of himself accepting a Can Gold Lion in June nineteen,
and it was super casual, like, hey, we just want
(26:07):
a candle Gold Lion. And he hadn't told me he
was going to be in France. That he hadn't told, Like,
I've found out through Instagram that he was in Can.
I had to d m him and be like, oh cool,
you're in Europe, and uh yeah, it was. It was.
It was really shocking, and I had That was a
(26:30):
very hol week for me because first of all, I,
as I said, I'm not from the industry, so I
knew the cand gold line was a big deal, but
I didn't realize that it was like the oscars of
the ad industry. And I was receiving messages from all
sorts of people that I that never talked to me
were like Wow, congratulations, and it was it was. It
(26:56):
was like additional emotional labor for me. I had to
I had to basically lie on his behalf, you know.
People asked me why I wasn't there, and if I
said the truth, I wasn't invited, I wasn't told. That
would that would sort of blow our cover, right, and
(27:16):
I didn't want to create problems for sleeping giants, So
I just I was like, yeah, I just couldn't make it.
So I realized at that point that I was I
was not actually ever going to be made a part
of this campaign. I was being actively erased from the story. Um.
(27:39):
I was not mentioned anywhere at one of our our
sort of highest points of our campaign. And I realized
that all the things that I had been doing over
the past year. We're only serving to We're only serving
(27:59):
him and allowing him to sort of accumulate power. And
I was giving up my power. I was giving up
my power when I sent over pressed requests to him,
which allowed him to build out his resume and you
know and say, you know I've spoken to where I
have been quoted in all these news outlets. I was
(28:20):
giving up my ability to do the same. I was
giving up my power when I allowed myself to be
called founding organizer and UM and being consistently seen as
a number two and someone who doesn't you know, necessarily
know what's going on or or can speak for the organization.
(28:44):
So I made an executive decision over my own life.
I promoted myself to co founder and the first opportunity
I had to do that was about two months later.
It was actually this exactly this time last year when
I UM. I was preparing for presentation for a talk
(29:07):
in Scotland, and just a few days before I was
looking for a fresh example of tech platforms being irresponsible
and I went to the ku Klux Plans website and
found PayPal, a PayPal which it on their site. And
my brain is so broken that I don't know what
a big deal is anymore. I just tweeted it out
(29:28):
like I tweet a million other things, and I moved on,
you know, and UM. A couple of days later, just
right after I gave that big talk where someone had
changed my title bless them, from from co founder, from
founding organizer to co founder without my knowledge. But you
(29:50):
know again, bless them. So a couple of days after that,
PayPal banned the KKK from their services. At the BBC
called me asking for a quote, and I told them
that I was co founder of Sleeping Giants. UM. The
day after that, I got a profile out in an
(30:11):
ad industry magazine called The Drum. It turns out that
the reporter that I spoke to, the first reporter I
spoke to after the conference, was doing a profile on me,
And so I had this all of a sudden, I
had this profile on me calling calling me the co
founder of Sleeping Giants, and they had, you know, they
(30:33):
had It was like a full piece on what I
think of the ad industry and how things are going. Wow,
what did that feel like for you? It felt like
I had just come into my power, Like I had
just stepped into my power I was actually um. I
was with my friend Claire, who is now my business partner,
(30:58):
and we just looked at each other. I mean, she
knew that I had been going through a lot, and
we just looked at each other and we were like, Wow,
everything is turning around. Look how quickly things turn around
when you claim what's yours. Fuck yeah, I'm like, I'm
like on the verge of tears listening to this. I
(31:19):
think your story is your story, is my story. Your
story is the story of so many women of color
out there. I think that we are often told that
there is virtue in just keep your head down and
do your work and be behind the scenes. There's a
virtue in making yourself small and not claiming that power.
And then when you when you when you ride in
(31:40):
that lane of making yourself small, of not walking in
your power, and then you finally say I'm done with this.
Today is the day that I that I that I
abandoned that and I walk in my power. The feeling
like it is, it is like nothing else, and it
comes from inside right. And I think that we are
sold this lie that the path of just keep grinding,
(32:01):
keep your head down, and you'll get your you'll get
your reward, you'll get your credit someday. Maybe it just
really doesn't. It doesn't serve us, No, it doesn't. I
I spent. I can't imagine what I could have accomplished
(32:22):
if you know what I could have accomplished even sooner,
if I hadn't you know, if I had chosen to
step into that power before. What what I did instead?
Because after after that can incident, I was I was
I was going to leave. I mean, I deeply considered
leaving Sleeping Giants because I wasn't getting the respect I
(32:46):
was asking for. Because I was going to I'm always
gonna get was the crumbs in the relationship, in the
way that it stood at that point in time. What
I did instead was I decided to stay, and I
decided that I would change the rules. I wasn't going
to play by the rules that were made for me.
(33:08):
I guess the moment that I stopped playing by the rules,
and when I started to uh to speak to the press,
to start writing under my own name, which is something
that I hadn't been doing, people started to see. First
of all, people just started to see me. I just
became more visible, and that put me in a position
(33:30):
where people wanted to reach out to me because they
wanted to talk to me about my thoughts. And that
allowed me to start connecting with people in the industry.
And that's what helped me to meet the people who
would become my allies, the people who would make introductions
for me in the industry, um, you know, the people
(33:52):
who would become my future business partners. And it was
a slow moving situation. UM. None of it happened overnight.
But really that investment in building relationships UM and building
my knowledge was what helped me get to the point
(34:14):
where I could just come out and say, I am
co founder, and uh, this is who I am. You
talked earlier about your allies. You have this great line
on your medium piece that I love you say. It
cost nothing to make space for me, It cost nothing
to see see me in. It cost nothing to empower
other people to achieve their goals. And I think you
(34:35):
just really hit the nail on the head. All the
people in my life moved been my allies and my
co conspirators. They are the ones who are down to
send the email down, to write a reference, down, to
connect me with an opportunity. Because it doesn't cost them anything,
and I really think we need to reject this mindset
that tells us that we have to be stingy when
it comes to resources or putting somebody else on, because
(34:57):
what's better is if we lift others up as we
climb him, and all of our work is better when
we empower each other. There's truly enough room for all
of us. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean there were so many
times where I I mean, I mean, I I learned
so much in the past year, and many times I
(35:17):
offered to get on calls with you know, with my
partner and brief him on what I had learned, and
I wanted to make it work, and to the point
that I was willing to continue working with someone who
was fairly toxic towards me in the way that he
spoke to me at times. But I wanted to make
(35:39):
it work because the movement that we have here, the
movement that we have built, is more important than either
one of our egos. Do you ever feel that, you know,
I don't really even know how to put this. Like,
in work that involves tech and the internet, we have
this myth that there's this one genius is usually a
(36:00):
white dude, but it's usually this like one genius who
does everything. Like we love the idea that there's you know,
one lone wolf who is doing this really cool work,
and that really denies what we know is the truth
that so much of this work is collaborative, So much
of it is, you know, people working together. Do you
think that's a like like a problem in the tech
(36:21):
space and in the sort of ad space in general.
Oh yeah, I mean I could see the press was
dying to find their lone wolf hero for this sleeping
giant story. Like I just don't think they knew what
(36:41):
to do with a woman like in the story, which
made no sense to me because in the New York
Times article, in our big coming out article, we were
equally waited visually, you know, the pictures were the same size.
Why did no one ask about me? Like where did
the girl go? Where is she at? What does she
(37:04):
think about the issues? I mean, it is a campaign
against bigotry and sexism. Where is the brown girl? So yeah,
I think the industry as well as the media is
looking for their um, for their white man savior, which
is a problem. But I believe that I believe that,
(37:31):
I um, I mean, I've I've taken those lessons to heart,
and I I see how these stories are built now,
and I am dead set on never letting that happen again,
at least in in my life and in my in
my work, UM and the people whose lives that I touch.
UM with the company that Claire and I ended up starting,
(37:53):
after a year of working together, researching things together, interviewing
people to together, we launched this company as co founders,
as equal partners. There was never any question about it.
And I have name dropped her in well, I guess
in our relationship now as we started, as we started
(38:16):
this company, I'm sort of the more well known person
and I that sort of gives me, that sort of
puts me in a place of privilege in our relationship.
And so I use that to name drop her in
everything that I do. And when I see an opportunity
where I think, you know, an opportunity comes to me
(38:36):
that I think she's better suited for UM, I send
it over to her and she does the same for me.
Let's take a quick rape and we're back alongside our
partner Claire atkin Nandini now runs check my Ads, an
(38:59):
organization that helps brands keep their ad money away from
fake news, disinformation, and hate speech, and as much behind
the scene success as she had getting brands to pull
their ad dollars away from inflammatory sites with sleeping giants,
their work created another kind of problem. Brands, concerned about
ending up and sleeping giants as crosshairs and weary of
(39:19):
being associated with anything negative, started using keyword blocking software
to make sure their ads weren't running on controversial topics.
Now Wired reports that these ad blockers actually end up
blocking terms in kind of haphazard ways. The magazine publisher
Hearst complained that articles about Megan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex,
(39:40):
spelled s U s s e X. We're being blocked
because the word sex appeared on blocklists. What's worse, terms
like lesbian and bisexual We're blocked for being controversial. Some
blocklists also blocked ad placements on news articles from reputable
sites about coronavirus information, and some brands were blocking their
(40:01):
ads from new sites in general, creating less ad money
for an already struggling news industry. Her new company, check
my Ads aims to tackle the issues her workless Sleeping
Giants might have inadvertently contributed to. So I want to
talk about check my ads. I was just reading the
Wired piece about check my ads. So in a kind
of way, and forgive me if I bungle this, and
(40:22):
feel free to correct me. I'm no ad tech person,
but I gotta handle on it. So in a kind
of way, sleeping giants as as many you know, successes
as y'all had, in a kind of way, it kind
of made the media landscape a bit worse because some
brands were then like, oh well, if I'm gonna get
dinged for having my ad next to, you know, a
(40:45):
hate site, I'm just gonna have my ads pulled from
anything that could be possibly can you know, read as controversial,
even things like covid, you know, and so it really
kind of created a problem for how add hours were
spent in the media landscape more generally, is that is
that sort of correct? That's a huercent correct. What I
(41:07):
never anticipated working on this campaign, when you know, when
we when we started tweeting at companies, we were very
clear that we think that they should look at their
ad placement on breite bart because it is um you know,
we used very specific descriptors like homophobic, xenophobic, racist, white
nationalist UM. What we did not realize or anticipate was
(41:31):
that the way that that work would be interpreted in
the boardroom would be, Oh, these guys are just going
after UM content they don't agree with and content that
is like so called controversial because the boardrooms are filled
with mostly white people, the A, the ad industry is
(41:53):
mostly white guys, and the and the tech industry at
the attack industry are mostly white people, so they don't
feel comfortable having conversations about racism or even using that word.
So they literally just wopped out racist with the word
controversial or offensive or even yikes yikes moments, not yikes,
(42:20):
not yetikes it's called hate. Oh oh that really that
they will do some like I love the like upemisms
for not having to use the word racist. It's a
yikes moment. So check my ads is UM. We started
(42:40):
it as a brand safety consultancy. Two A help companies
check their ads to understand where their ads are going,
to help them identify UM, hate speech and disinformation in
their media by and we also, on the other hand,
help them to become more intentional about what they want
(43:02):
to support, because that's sort of what brands are looking
at these days, there's so many um there's so many
reasons that our existing channels are are toxic or brand
unsafe or causing trouble in society that brands and marketers
are really starting to explore ways to be um, be
(43:25):
smarter and and and and spend their money in a
way that's more aligned with their with their values. So
we're helping brands to define their own rules and define
what where the line is when it comes to their
media by so that really helps them to start thinking
(43:46):
about what they want to support in a way that
doesn't feel political. We want them to be able to
have that conversation through a shared language where they but
they're able to sit on and say we shouldn't be
advertising on a website like this because it's not aligned
with you know, this value or um you know or
(44:10):
this campaign that we have in place, and to do
so in a way that doesn't make people feel uncomfortable.
So we want people to to We want to be
able to facilitate those conversations within a company so they
can make those decisions ahead of time instead of having
to respond to them. You know, when it turns into
a massive issue on social media, Nandini is fully a
(44:30):
leader in her industry. Her innovative work helps shift culture
and build paths for accountability online that anyone with a
Twitter account can participate in. And now she's building on
what she's learned to refine the way she makes change.
None of this would be possible if she had just
kept her head down, made herself small, and followed somebody
else's plan for her life. After she published her medium,
(44:53):
Peace in a tweet, Not apologized and acknowledged Nandini as
a rightful co founder of Sleeping Giants, and now she
wants to make sure that other women know there's nothing
wrong with one in credit for your work? What would
you say to a woman out there that's listening that
you know is keeping your head down, She's doing the grind.
(45:14):
She's afraid to step into her power. As you put it,
You know she she wants credit, she wants that title,
but she doesn't know where to start, and she's afraid
to even to even start that journey. What would you
say to someone like that? I would say that she
can start building our own power today by writing I
(45:38):
was able to start building my power when I had
nothing and nobody simply by writing a little bit on
LinkedIn every day, just a little bit about current events,
about how I feel about something that happened, my opinion,
my perspective. No one asked, and for a long time,
no one cares. But when you do it every day,
(45:59):
you demonstrate at your knowledge and your insight, You represent
what you're capable of. You show people how you think
and how you approach problems, and people do start to
pay attention. You do start to build out the people
who care, the people who want to engage with you
and uh and from there you grow out the you
(46:22):
can start building out the relationships that you need to
either you know, find your next place, a less toxic place,
a place where you can be more powerful and um
and at the very least too to build your personal influence.
That was something that really helped me, was just positioning
(46:44):
myself as a thought leader, even if it was to
no one but me. Right exactly, You just you get
used to saying I That was something that I never
did because I thought, who cares? Like, who cares what
I think? Right? I don't even care what I think?
That was That was the attitude I had about myself.
So just the simple act of saying I this is
(47:06):
what I think was quite radical for me, because what
you think matters, so what you write matters too. Got
a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just
want to say hi? You can reach us at Hello
at tang godi dot com. You can also find transcripts
for today's episode at tangdi dot com. There Are No
(47:27):
Girls on the Internet was created by me, bridget Toad.
It's a production of iHeart Radio and Unboss creative Jonathan
Strickland as our executive producer. Terry Harrison is our producer
and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm
your host, bridget Toad. If you want to help us grow,
rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts
from I heeart Radio, check out the iHeart Radio app,
(47:47):
Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts well
There are No Girls on the Internet. As a production
of I Heart Radio and Unbossed Creative, I'm Bridget Todd
and this is there are no girls on the Internet.
Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy. There's no hiring
bias against women in tech. They just suck at interviews.
(00:26):
Will be rather your child have feminism or cancer? All
of these completely messed up headlines where actual headlines of
stories published on the far right website bright bark dot com,
known for publishing misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist articles, dangerous conspiracy theories,
and deliberately misleading stories. It's also one of the most
(00:48):
important sites in the era of Trump. Their former chairman,
Steve Bannon even served as Trump's chief strategist. And where
there's an online website, there's brands keeping that website afloat
by giving them need to run ads on that website.
But one group went on a mission to make that
kind of racism, misogyny, and hate speech unprofitable. Sleeping Giants
(01:10):
became one of the most influential activist organizations of the
Trump era. Their strategy involved urging their members to tweet
screenshots of brands running ads on websites that support and
published hate speech, asking if those sites match their values
and urging them to pull their ads. In doing so,
they learned that oftentimes reputable brands have no idea what
(01:31):
sites their ads run on. Sleeping Giants was run anonymously
to create the impression that it was run by more
than just two people. After the conservative news outlet Daily
Caller published a piece out in one person behind Sleeping Giants,
Matt Rivets, he and his family faced death threats. Later,
Matt was profiled in a New York Times piece alongside
(01:52):
Sleeping Giants co founder Nandini Jammy. Sleeping Giants was so
successful that they contributed to Breitbart seeing drop and ad revenue.
They also contributed to a broader conversation about how reputable
brands are funding extremism by spending ad money on websites
that published hate speech. So this should be a success
(02:13):
story right. In July, Nandini published a scathing piece on
medium saying that while she believes she was working with
Man as a partner, he gaslighted her out of the
movement they built together. While they're working, relationships started on
a good note. Matt began taking high profile speaking engagements
and obscuring her role in their work, eventually erasing her altogether.
(02:35):
She writes, I want to share with you my journey
was sleeping giants while taking credit matters, And while you
must fight for yourself as hard as you fight for
your cause, I want to show you how a woman
of color almost disappeared from the movement she built, and
what you can achieve when you refuse to follow the
rules your white male leader sets for you. I hope
other brilliant women of color and marginalized folks see yourselves
(02:58):
in me and don't wait as long as I did.
The stakes are too high for you to disappear. Now,
Nandini is done letting her voice be left out of
the narrative. So how did you get started in this work?
In November, I was working as as head of growth
for a tech startup and I went to visit breitbar
(03:21):
dot com for the first time after the elections. Just
like everyone else, I was trying to figure out what
happened and what we're dealing with here, and the first
thing I noticed was ads for some of the biggest
companies in the world on this website. You know, we've
been hearing a lot about how it was putting out
(03:44):
pat speech and you know, misinformation and big stories and
all that stuff. But no one had ever really talked about, um,
the ads and the ads are how that website makes money.
So I'm no genius. I just I had like run
Google ad campaign like once a couple of months before that,
(04:04):
and I had been quite particular about where my ads
were going. I was I was curious and interested in
making sure they were appearing in uh in sort of
reputable places on the Internet. And so the first thing
I thought of was, you know the site placements. You know,
the the marketers wore running their campaigns are not looking
(04:25):
at their site placements. And all we have to do
is get these um get these folks to add brighte
bart dot com to their exclusion list. If they do that,
then brighte bart will no longer make money. Like it
was kind of like a crazy idea because there are
(04:47):
so many companies who have Google ads, like possibly millions UM,
and the idea was to get all of them to
one by one to drop to drop right part. So UM,
I I wrote a little I wrote a Medium post
and hoped for it to go viral. UM where basically
(05:08):
sort of outlined this crack pot idea where I was like,
we should all just go into our Google ads added
to our exclusion list and then Breitbart won't receive our
money anymore and then they'll go out of business. And UM.
While that piece didn't go viral, the concept of tweeting
at a company, which is something that I did as
(05:29):
while I tweeted out at like Old maybe that was
the first at I saw UM and letting them know
that their ad is funding uh this hateful website was
UM was something that that took off someone uh, someone
else on the other side of the country, my my
partner who became my partner UM had the same idea.
(05:49):
We we sort of went into business in that sense
in uh, in terms of reaching out to companies and
asking them to check their ads and make sure that
they have bright Bart on their on their exclusion list.
And it just kind of took off from there. So
from you writing this piece urging these brands to to
(06:11):
block you know, ad spins on bright Bart, this is
how you first got connected with Matt. Matt reached out
to you from this piece and thought we should work together.
How did this How did your relationship with Matt and
Sleeping Giants come to be. So I wrote this piece
on I believe it was November, and then by the
next day I had he had like tweeted at me,
(06:34):
same awesome article. We're doing the same thing. We should
you know, UM, you should join us? And I was
like super excited to see that someone else had the
same idea. We moved very quickly from d MS to
email to phone. UM. Turns out like we just have
a lot in common. We're both copyriters, UM, were both
(06:55):
originally from Maryland. UM, and and yeah, he seems really cool,
so I wanted too. Of course they wanted to work together. UM.
I think like for me, working joining forces meant that
we were like partners. UM. He had just started Sleeping
Giants as an account a week before, and it was
(07:16):
it was still nothing, you know, there was maybe a
couple of dozen, maybe a couple hundred followers. UM. What
we decided to do was I would run the Facebook page.
So we started up with Facebook page, which I um
became responsible for, and he continued to learn the Twitter account.
And there was no like formal agreement or anything like
(07:40):
that because we never imagined that it would turn into anything.
So we were just like al right, like it was
just taking it one day at a time, flying by
the seat of our pants, kind of a deal. Nondini
and Matt hit on something big. By harnessing the power
of collective social media users to pressure brands out of
funding hate you were having a real impact. They got
(08:02):
thousands of brands like A T and T, BMW, Visa, Lift,
and Warby Parker to stop running ads on Breitbart. Steve
Bannon was even recorded talking about Sleeping Giants at a
dinner in two thousand eighteen. When I left in to
takeularly campaign, we were going to make like eight million
dollars three cans flow that after we won UM. This
(08:24):
group called Sleeping Giants a group of technics. They literally
stripped out. They went to the thirty five exchanges that
sell the ads, so the ad revenues dropped like nineties.
They even got Breitbart so mad that after Kellogg's pulled
their ads, Breitbart tried to organize an embarrassingly unsuccessful counterboycott,
(08:44):
which Kellogg said had no discernible impact on their sales.
After it was revealed that Fox News is Bill O'Reilly
settled five different sexual harassment suits Sleeping giants pressured brands
to stop advertising on a show. In a week's time,
the O'Riley factor I lost more than half of its
advertisers and Bill O'Reilly went on vacation and never returned.
(09:06):
What were some of the successes that you all had
with Sleeping Giants that you were really proud of? Oh
my god, we did We did so much. Um. I
mean there was just a daily brind of of getting
ads to drop we I mean just the first few months,
the first few months of this campaign was every day, um,
(09:30):
you know, a couple of dozen brands or whatever would
would drop right Bart. Sometimes it would be like really
big ones. So our first big win was Kelloggs. That
was like that resulted in uh, bright Bart starting a
campaign called I think it was like dump Kelloggs or something,
(09:51):
and it was it completely backfired and think they were
like Kelloggs, Kelloggs doesn't support our uh you know brighte
Bart readers, so we're going we're gonna We're gonna dump
Kellogg's in the sink or something like that. It was
so stupid, um, but it gave us our first international headlines,
so that was really cool. Um. But yeah, the first
(10:11):
the first couple of months was just like just like
every every so often, some big brand would come out
and be like, yeah, we're not we don't support the ship,
and then um, after a while, we we felt like
we could, you know, start working on other things. The
first time we moved out of the sort of grew
(10:32):
out of the breitbartwork was when we decided to target
Bill O'Reilly's advertisers. Bill O'Reilly had been sexually harassing his
colleagues in the workplace for um a period of decades,
and The New York Times reported on it. We were like, well,
this really does this fits into our our mission statement
(10:53):
of making bigotry and sexism unprofitable, and we felt like
this is something we could take on. So we um,
we decided to contact Bill O'Reilly advertisers using the same
exactmo that we did with breite bar, just you know,
presenting them with the information and letting them make their
own decision. And Bill O'Reilly lost dozens of advertisers, and
(11:18):
a couple of months later he was on spring break
and or an unplanned vacation or whatever planned vacation heavy
scare quotes around that, I know, right, Yeah, and then
he was he was gone, and they were like, wow,
we were really onto something and um, and then we
went on to uh target Tucker Carlson's advertisers. He's lost
(11:43):
over I believe eight advertisers over the past two years
that we've been working on that. Um. His show is
basically uh unprofitable. It's one of the highest rated shows
on television. It just doesn't bring in any money. Yeah.
Just as a side note, one of my day jobs
involves working with a feminist activist group and we've targeted
(12:03):
Tucker Carlson over the years. And I don't know what
the deal is, but it's like that guy just keeps
hanging on. We can't we can't seem to get him
out of here. I think it's a lot of personal spite,
to be honest, because after we got we got there,
there was one advertiser, um who uh there their their
language learning app called Babel, and they put out quite
(12:26):
the blistering statement on their Tucker Carlson ads. UM. They
were sort of caught, uh caught unawares, and they responded
to our tweet saying, uh, this is uh We're so sorry.
We never um, you know, we're disappointed that our ads
showed up on Tucker Carlson. We find his rhetoric to
(12:47):
be repugnant, and that just triggered them. Um, they released
I think their first statement specifically calling us out. Um
it was us Media Matters and move on dot Org
and it was actually, I mean, I was very proud
of that. I mean, we're just two people running an
account in our spare time. So I felt like I
(13:12):
felt pretty proud of proud of ourselves. Then you should
definitely feel so proud of the work that you accomplished
with Sleeping Giants, even though it you know, you should,
no one can take that away from you. That those
are huge winds and also huge, you know, culture changing moments.
You know this idea that, yeah, brands do have a
responsibility to be a little bit choosy about with their
(13:34):
money goes. We should be pressuring brands to open their
eyes to where they spend their money. Like, that's a
huge cultural shift that I don't think existed before your work.
So you should definitely feel very, very proud and accomplished
about that. Thank you. So when did things start to
feel not so good working with Man on Sleeping Giants? Yeah,
so we had a really good relationship from the beginning. UM,
(13:59):
he was very nice to me and UM, and I
also I admired him a lot, and I UM, I
never imagined that there would ever be problems because it
was like we're we're both here every day putting in
the work, and UM and we I think there was
a lot of mutual respect. At least that's what it
(14:20):
felt like. When Matt realized that he was about to
be docked by the Daily Pollar, he went to The
New York Times to sort of get get ahead of
the story, and during that time asked me whether I
would like to be interviewed for the story. And I
guess I I mean I when he said that, I
think I assumed that I was being asked as a partner.
(14:44):
I spoke to the reporter. I told her, UM, you
know how I was involved in all the stuff that
we were doing, and you know a little bit of
background detail on on how he worked. And she asked
me if I was UM. She asked me what my
title was and I said co found under and then
she was like great. And then she comes back the
next day and does a little fact check in and UM,
(15:06):
and she's like, by the way, your partner said that
you are not a co founder, and I was like, oh, okay,
And I didn't want to make a big deal out
of it, so I didn't. I was like, just go
with whatever he says. But UM. That was sort of
the first indicator that something was off UM. And then
after that, my uh, you know, the story came out,
(15:29):
and my partner went on to take interviews with uh,
sort of high profile outlets like Platsy America with Carra Squsher,
spoke with Katie Kurig. And it was after his interview
with Adweek that I became concerned about UM, about everything
(15:52):
because he uh, he had called himself UM. He was
positioning himself as co founder, which was fined by me.
But in that article, I was positioned or portrayed as UM,
one of the individuals helping him run the accounts. So
at that point I called a meeting and I said, hey, listen,
I don't want to be portrayed as your helper or
(16:12):
your assistant. It's important that I UM that I'm also
portrayed as a leader, because you know, I have been
involved in this work for the whole time, and I
realized that I'm in a really unique position like both
of us were both in a very unique position to
(16:33):
be able to influence the advertising industry. And I want
to be able to speak at conferences and events, and
I want to be present at the table when some
of these big decisions are being made. And that's why
it's important to me to have a title. UM. So
I you know, we had that discussion and he said, UM,
(16:54):
I completely understand. Let's get you a title. You can
call yourself, UM, you know, whatever you want, obviously not founder.
I'm a founder, so you can call yourself, you know,
come up with any So I said, how about founding organizer?
And he agreed to that. So that is UM, That's
what I called myself for about a year. During that time,
(17:15):
he he continued to position himself as founder, of course,
and was able to leverage that too, UM to get
invited to big conferences. Uh you know, I don't know,
for example, south By Southwest and UM Advertising Week and
so on. And I just kind of felt like I
(17:37):
was flailing. I didn't really have an opportunity to um
to you know, to to speak at anything like that,
because I mean I didn't have a title, and b
I didn't have any contacts in the industry. I truly
was sort of cast out on my own again, like
advertising isn't really my world. I don't have connections that
(18:00):
industry I worked in, like the tech startup scene. It's
a totally different world. So UM, so it was. It was.
It was frustrating I couldn't get to where I wanted
to be. So what I did was I asked him
for I basically asked him for the scraps. I was like,
can I like, would you mind telling me about some
(18:21):
of these conferences that you're going to. I would love
to come along. I would like to be your plus one. Um,
you know, we can work the room together, we can
meet more people together. UM. You know. I was always
really careful about I don't want to steal your thunder.
I don't want the attention. I just want to be
working in the background. UM two, I don't know to
to to make something happen. And um and he would
(18:46):
you know, there was there was a power differential there
because he this is his industry, and he's older than me,
and he knows more people than me, and he would
bring that up quite frequently in the calls that we had. UM.
I was sort of outlining my issues, so he never
really um, you know, he'd always say, yeah, sure I
(19:06):
will you know, I'll let you know, i'll give you
I'll give you a shout if these if these things happened,
But he never did that. There was a couple of
other things that concerned me. I didn't have any access
to the general Inquiries email, just like I just didn't
know what was coming into into the organization, Like was
(19:29):
he receiving media opportunities there um or opportunities to speak,
private consulting opportunities. These were the kinds of things that
weren't coming to me necessarily. Um he was asking me too.
He had asked me to send all press requests to
him because that would help us stay on message. So
(19:51):
you don't want too many people speaking to the press.
I thought that was a little weird because you know,
I was writing the Facebook account pletely independently. It's not
like I was getting permission from him before I wrote
post or anything like that. So it's not like I
would model the message because I know what the message is.
I write the message every day. I don't think I
(20:13):
just I don't like I'm not involved in anything related
to the merch shop. I don't know how much money
is being made. I don't know how it's been spent um.
When I asked for access to that, he said, you're
just gonna have to trust me, And yeah, I didn't know.
I didn't I didn't know what to do with that.
(20:34):
We'll be right back, let's get right back into it.
As Matt's public profile grew, Nandini's role in Sleeping Giants
was obscured. As she writes in her medium piece on Twitter,
Matt began to replace what was once a collective we
(20:56):
with I and my The work I had done with
sleep Giants was also appearing on his conference bio. The
vagueness that once helped us look like a mysterious group
bigger than we were was now being claimed solely by him.
I didn't have the media attention or connections that Matt did.
I wasn't forty five white, and I certainly didn't know
anybody in advertising. I was young, unknown, and invisible. It's
(21:22):
difficult for me to hear about Nundini's experience with Sleeping Giants.
I certainly know what it's like to be passed over
for being credited or compensated for my work, and if
you're a woman, especially a woman of color, you probably
know what that feels like too. I've avoided speaking up
because I didn't want to seem like a bragger or
someone who couldn't share the spotlight, or worse, someone who
was only interested in accolades. And in our deeply sexist culture,
(21:47):
is there anything more shameful than being a woman who
wants success? And it's especially tricky when you're working for
social change. The implication of being that we should all
be doing the work just because we care about making change,
not be because we want credit. But this line of
thinking can actually be kind of a trap that keeps
us from taking what's ours while our winds are claimed
(22:08):
by somebody else. You're not an attention seeker for wanting
to be acknowledged for your work. One thing that I
hear time and time again is why it's important to
get credit. I feel like people really need to understand
that it's not about fame and fortune and the limelight. Unfortunately,
the way that it works in the in many tech
(22:28):
industries is if you don't have a title, or if
you don't if you're not able to point to something
and say yeah, I did that, you're not going to
get invited to the conference, You're not going to get
invited to speak, You're not going to get you know,
the consulting opportunity, You're not going to be able to
build up your platform to be able to have a
bigger footprint to do the kind of work and make
(22:49):
the kind of change that you want to make. And
so when women, particularly women of color, advocate for themselves
to get the title, to get the credit, it's not
because we're fame hungry, you know, attention hungry, you know,
spotlight hogs. It's because if we don't have those things,
we're not going to be able to have the kind
of impact that we want to be able to have.
(23:11):
And so I think that, I mean, I guess I
know that I have often felt a little skittish about
asking for a title or because I don't want to
look like I'm trying to, you know, be a fame
a fame hug or something, when in reality, it's just
how it's just the nature of how a lot of
these businesses work. But I mean, you said it, that's
(23:32):
exactly right. I was so afraid of looking like for
being perceived as someone who just wanted attention that I
tried to sidestuff that issue by uh by denying my
self credit and by sort of actively staying away from
the titles that would have given me the power I
needed as a co founder. When I finally made that
(23:55):
shift from a nonsense title founding organizer doesn't mean anything.
It's like assistant to the regional manager. Um. When I
made that shift, uh, I just I found that people
responded to me differently. I found that I took myself
(24:17):
more seriously. UM. It was really eye opening to me
to see how how important titles are for people who
are not traditionally viewed as leaders in the society. UM.
I almost underestimated myself, Like how I guess I didn't
(24:40):
realize how the how the world sees me that was.
That was something that I kind of learned the hard
way the world. Uh. You know, despite the fact that
I was good at what I do, that I had
demonstrated my my abilities, I people looked at me and
didn't see me as a leader. They a lot, I'm
sure a lot of people still don't. UM. So, really
(25:01):
claiming that title is one of the most important things
that you can do. And I don't want anyone to
think that um that doing that is is some kind
of of making a bee line for the fame and
fortune or the glory of it all. Nandini decided that
she was going to stop playing by the rules Matt
set for her, the rules that allowed him to grow
(25:23):
his public profile while she went't forgotten and overlooked the
rules that allowed Matt to fly to France to accept
the prestigious Cans Lion Award, essentially the Oscars of the
creative industry on behalf of the organization they created together
without even telling her. So when did you decide I
am going to claim this title for myself. I'm going
(25:44):
to walk in walk in this title and walk in
this purpose. And I don't care what Matt thinks. It
was after. It was after he deemed me a picture
of himself accepting a Can Gold Lion in June nineteen,
and it was super casual, like, hey, we just want
(26:07):
a candle Gold Lion. And he hadn't told me he
was going to be in France. That he hadn't told, Like,
I've found out through Instagram that he was in Can.
I had to d m him and be like, oh cool,
you're in Europe, and uh yeah, it was. It was.
It was really shocking, and I had That was a
(26:30):
very hol week for me because first of all, I,
as I said, I'm not from the industry, so I
knew the cand gold line was a big deal, but
I didn't realize that it was like the oscars of
the ad industry. And I was receiving messages from all
sorts of people that I that never talked to me
were like Wow, congratulations, and it was it was. It
(26:56):
was like additional emotional labor for me. I had to
I had to basically lie on his behalf, you know.
People asked me why I wasn't there, and if I
said the truth, I wasn't invited, I wasn't told. That
would that would sort of blow our cover, right, and
(27:16):
I didn't want to create problems for sleeping giants, So
I just I was like, yeah, I just couldn't make it.
So I realized at that point that I was I
was not actually ever going to be made a part
of this campaign. I was being actively erased from the story. Um.
(27:39):
I was not mentioned anywhere at one of our our
sort of highest points of our campaign. And I realized
that all the things that I had been doing over
the past year. We're only serving to We're only serving
(27:59):
him and allowing him to sort of accumulate power. And
I was giving up my power. I was giving up
my power when I sent over pressed requests to him,
which allowed him to build out his resume and you
know and say, you know I've spoken to where I
have been quoted in all these news outlets. I was
(28:20):
giving up my ability to do the same. I was
giving up my power when I allowed myself to be
called founding organizer and UM and being consistently seen as
a number two and someone who doesn't you know, necessarily
know what's going on or or can speak for the organization.
(28:44):
So I made an executive decision over my own life.
I promoted myself to co founder and the first opportunity
I had to do that was about two months later.
It was actually this exactly this time last year when
I UM. I was preparing for presentation for a talk
(29:07):
in Scotland, and just a few days before I was
looking for a fresh example of tech platforms being irresponsible
and I went to the ku Klux Plans website and
found PayPal, a PayPal which it on their site. And
my brain is so broken that I don't know what
a big deal is anymore. I just tweeted it out
(29:28):
like I tweet a million other things, and I moved on,
you know, and UM. A couple of days later, just
right after I gave that big talk where someone had
changed my title bless them, from from co founder, from
founding organizer to co founder without my knowledge. But you
(29:50):
know again, bless them. So a couple of days after that,
PayPal banned the KKK from their services. At the BBC
called me asking for a quote, and I told them
that I was co founder of Sleeping Giants. UM. The
day after that, I got a profile out in an
(30:11):
ad industry magazine called The Drum. It turns out that
the reporter that I spoke to, the first reporter I
spoke to after the conference, was doing a profile on me,
And so I had this all of a sudden, I
had this profile on me calling calling me the co
founder of Sleeping Giants, and they had, you know, they
(30:33):
had It was like a full piece on what I
think of the ad industry and how things are going. Wow,
what did that feel like for you? It felt like
I had just come into my power, Like I had
just stepped into my power I was actually um. I
was with my friend Claire, who is now my business partner,
(30:58):
and we just looked at each other. I mean, she
knew that I had been going through a lot, and
we just looked at each other and we were like, Wow,
everything is turning around. Look how quickly things turn around
when you claim what's yours. Fuck yeah, I'm like, I'm
like on the verge of tears listening to this. I
(31:19):
think your story is your story, is my story. Your
story is the story of so many women of color
out there. I think that we are often told that
there is virtue in just keep your head down and
do your work and be behind the scenes. There's a
virtue in making yourself small and not claiming that power.
And then when you when you when you ride in
(31:40):
that lane of making yourself small, of not walking in
your power, and then you finally say I'm done with this.
Today is the day that I that I that I
abandoned that and I walk in my power. The feeling
like it is, it is like nothing else, and it
comes from inside right. And I think that we are
sold this lie that the path of just keep grinding,
(32:01):
keep your head down, and you'll get your you'll get
your reward, you'll get your credit someday. Maybe it just
really doesn't. It doesn't serve us, No, it doesn't. I
I spent. I can't imagine what I could have accomplished
(32:22):
if you know what I could have accomplished even sooner,
if I hadn't you know, if I had chosen to
step into that power before. What what I did instead?
Because after after that can incident, I was I was
I was going to leave. I mean, I deeply considered
leaving Sleeping Giants because I wasn't getting the respect I
(32:46):
was asking for. Because I was going to I'm always
gonna get was the crumbs in the relationship, in the
way that it stood at that point in time. What
I did instead was I decided to stay, and I
decided that I would change the rules. I wasn't going
to play by the rules that were made for me.
(33:08):
I guess the moment that I stopped playing by the rules,
and when I started to uh to speak to the press,
to start writing under my own name, which is something
that I hadn't been doing, people started to see. First
of all, people just started to see me. I just
became more visible, and that put me in a position
(33:30):
where people wanted to reach out to me because they
wanted to talk to me about my thoughts. And that
allowed me to start connecting with people in the industry.
And that's what helped me to meet the people who
would become my allies, the people who would make introductions
for me in the industry, um, you know, the people
(33:52):
who would become my future business partners. And it was
a slow moving situation. UM. None of it happened overnight.
But really that investment in building relationships UM and building
my knowledge was what helped me get to the point
(34:14):
where I could just come out and say, I am
co founder, and uh, this is who I am. You
talked earlier about your allies. You have this great line
on your medium piece that I love you say. It
cost nothing to make space for me, It cost nothing
to see see me in. It cost nothing to empower
other people to achieve their goals. And I think you
(34:35):
just really hit the nail on the head. All the
people in my life moved been my allies and my
co conspirators. They are the ones who are down to
send the email down, to write a reference, down, to
connect me with an opportunity. Because it doesn't cost them anything,
and I really think we need to reject this mindset
that tells us that we have to be stingy when
it comes to resources or putting somebody else on, because
(34:57):
what's better is if we lift others up as we
climb him, and all of our work is better when
we empower each other. There's truly enough room for all
of us. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean there were so many
times where I I mean, I mean, I I learned
so much in the past year, and many times I
(35:17):
offered to get on calls with you know, with my
partner and brief him on what I had learned, and
I wanted to make it work, and to the point
that I was willing to continue working with someone who
was fairly toxic towards me in the way that he
spoke to me at times. But I wanted to make
(35:39):
it work because the movement that we have here, the
movement that we have built, is more important than either
one of our egos. Do you ever feel that, you know,
I don't really even know how to put this. Like,
in work that involves tech and the internet, we have
this myth that there's this one genius is usually a
(36:00):
white dude, but it's usually this like one genius who
does everything. Like we love the idea that there's you know,
one lone wolf who is doing this really cool work,
and that really denies what we know is the truth
that so much of this work is collaborative, So much
of it is, you know, people working together. Do you
think that's a like like a problem in the tech
(36:21):
space and in the sort of ad space in general.
Oh yeah, I mean I could see the press was
dying to find their lone wolf hero for this sleeping
giant story. Like I just don't think they knew what
(36:41):
to do with a woman like in the story, which
made no sense to me because in the New York
Times article, in our big coming out article, we were
equally waited visually, you know, the pictures were the same size.
Why did no one ask about me? Like where did
the girl go? Where is she at? What does she
(37:04):
think about the issues? I mean, it is a campaign
against bigotry and sexism. Where is the brown girl? So yeah,
I think the industry as well as the media is
looking for their um, for their white man savior, which
is a problem. But I believe that I believe that,
(37:31):
I um, I mean, I've I've taken those lessons to heart,
and I I see how these stories are built now,
and I am dead set on never letting that happen again,
at least in in my life and in my in
my work, UM and the people whose lives that I touch.
UM with the company that Claire and I ended up starting,
(37:53):
after a year of working together, researching things together, interviewing
people to together, we launched this company as co founders,
as equal partners. There was never any question about it.
And I have name dropped her in well, I guess
in our relationship now as we started, as we started
(38:16):
this company, I'm sort of the more well known person
and I that sort of gives me, that sort of
puts me in a place of privilege in our relationship.
And so I use that to name drop her in
everything that I do. And when I see an opportunity
where I think, you know, an opportunity comes to me
(38:36):
that I think she's better suited for UM, I send
it over to her and she does the same for me.
Let's take a quick rape and we're back alongside our
partner Claire atkin Nandini now runs check my Ads, an
(38:59):
organization that helps brands keep their ad money away from
fake news, disinformation, and hate speech, and as much behind
the scene success as she had getting brands to pull
their ad dollars away from inflammatory sites with sleeping giants,
their work created another kind of problem. Brands, concerned about
ending up and sleeping giants as crosshairs and weary of
(39:19):
being associated with anything negative, started using keyword blocking software
to make sure their ads weren't running on controversial topics.
Now Wired reports that these ad blockers actually end up
blocking terms in kind of haphazard ways. The magazine publisher
Hearst complained that articles about Megan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex,
(39:40):
spelled s U s s e X. We're being blocked
because the word sex appeared on blocklists. What's worse, terms
like lesbian and bisexual We're blocked for being controversial. Some
blocklists also blocked ad placements on news articles from reputable
sites about coronavirus information, and some brands were blocking their
(40:01):
ads from new sites in general, creating less ad money
for an already struggling news industry. Her new company, check
my Ads aims to tackle the issues her workless Sleeping
Giants might have inadvertently contributed to. So I want to
talk about check my ads. I was just reading the
Wired piece about check my ads. So in a kind
of way, and forgive me if I bungle this, and
(40:22):
feel free to correct me. I'm no ad tech person,
but I gotta handle on it. So in a kind
of way, sleeping giants as as many you know, successes
as y'all had, in a kind of way, it kind
of made the media landscape a bit worse because some
brands were then like, oh well, if I'm gonna get
dinged for having my ad next to, you know, a
(40:45):
hate site, I'm just gonna have my ads pulled from
anything that could be possibly can you know, read as controversial,
even things like covid, you know, and so it really
kind of created a problem for how add hours were
spent in the media landscape more generally, is that is
that sort of correct? That's a huercent correct. What I
(41:07):
never anticipated working on this campaign, when you know, when
we when we started tweeting at companies, we were very
clear that we think that they should look at their
ad placement on breite bart because it is um you know,
we used very specific descriptors like homophobic, xenophobic, racist, white
nationalist UM. What we did not realize or anticipate was
(41:31):
that the way that that work would be interpreted in
the boardroom would be, Oh, these guys are just going
after UM content they don't agree with and content that
is like so called controversial because the boardrooms are filled
with mostly white people, the A, the ad industry is
(41:53):
mostly white guys, and the and the tech industry at
the attack industry are mostly white people, so they don't
feel comfortable having conversations about racism or even using that word.
So they literally just wopped out racist with the word
controversial or offensive or even yikes yikes moments, not yikes,
(42:20):
not yetikes it's called hate. Oh oh that really that
they will do some like I love the like upemisms
for not having to use the word racist. It's a
yikes moment. So check my ads is UM. We started
(42:40):
it as a brand safety consultancy. Two A help companies
check their ads to understand where their ads are going,
to help them identify UM, hate speech and disinformation in
their media by and we also, on the other hand,
help them to become more intentional about what they want
(43:02):
to support, because that's sort of what brands are looking
at these days, there's so many um there's so many
reasons that our existing channels are are toxic or brand
unsafe or causing trouble in society that brands and marketers
are really starting to explore ways to be um, be
(43:25):
smarter and and and and spend their money in a
way that's more aligned with their with their values. So
we're helping brands to define their own rules and define
what where the line is when it comes to their
media by so that really helps them to start thinking
(43:46):
about what they want to support in a way that
doesn't feel political. We want them to be able to
have that conversation through a shared language where they but
they're able to sit on and say we shouldn't be
advertising on a website like this because it's not aligned
with you know, this value or um you know or
(44:10):
this campaign that we have in place, and to do
so in a way that doesn't make people feel uncomfortable.
So we want people to to We want to be
able to facilitate those conversations within a company so they
can make those decisions ahead of time instead of having
to respond to them. You know, when it turns into
a massive issue on social media, Nandini is fully a
(44:30):
leader in her industry. Her innovative work helps shift culture
and build paths for accountability online that anyone with a
Twitter account can participate in. And now she's building on
what she's learned to refine the way she makes change.
None of this would be possible if she had just
kept her head down, made herself small, and followed somebody
else's plan for her life. After she published her medium,
(44:53):
Peace in a tweet, Not apologized and acknowledged Nandini as
a rightful co founder of Sleeping Giants, and now she
wants to make sure that other women know there's nothing
wrong with one in credit for your work? What would
you say to a woman out there that's listening that
you know is keeping your head down, She's doing the grind.
(45:14):
She's afraid to step into her power. As you put it,
You know she she wants credit, she wants that title,
but she doesn't know where to start, and she's afraid
to even to even start that journey. What would you
say to someone like that? I would say that she
can start building our own power today by writing I
(45:38):
was able to start building my power when I had
nothing and nobody simply by writing a little bit on
LinkedIn every day, just a little bit about current events,
about how I feel about something that happened, my opinion,
my perspective. No one asked, and for a long time,
no one cares. But when you do it every day,
(45:59):
you demonstrate at your knowledge and your insight, You represent
what you're capable of. You show people how you think
and how you approach problems, and people do start to
pay attention. You do start to build out the people
who care, the people who want to engage with you
and uh and from there you grow out the you
(46:22):
can start building out the relationships that you need to
either you know, find your next place, a less toxic place,
a place where you can be more powerful and um
and at the very least too to build your personal influence.
That was something that really helped me, was just positioning
(46:44):
myself as a thought leader, even if it was to
no one but me. Right exactly, You just you get
used to saying I That was something that I never
did because I thought, who cares? Like, who cares what
I think? Right? I don't even care what I think?
That was That was the attitude I had about myself.
So just the simple act of saying I this is
(47:06):
what I think was quite radical for me, because what
you think matters, so what you write matters too. Got
a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just
want to say hi? You can reach us at Hello
at tang godi dot com. You can also find transcripts
for today's episode at tangdi dot com. There Are No
(47:27):
Girls on the Internet was created by me, bridget Toad.
It's a production of iHeart Radio and Unboss creative Jonathan
Strickland as our executive producer. Terry Harrison is our producer
and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm
your host, bridget Toad. If you want to help us grow,
rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts
from I heeart Radio, check out the iHeart Radio app,
(47:47):
Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts well
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