Advertising’s not about democracy, it’s about eyeballs

Even before the “anti-woke” GB News channel began its first broadcast, the campaign group Stop Funding Hate had started a boycott. As the first shows began to air, the outrage started to grow on Twitter and the calls for boycotting advertisers increased. Viewers could now identify and contact those corporations who were giving their money to the news channel.

Four days on later, and GB News have hit back with a boycott of their own. They are urging their viewers to boycott the companies boycotting them. These include the Open University, Specsavers, Grolsch, Ikea, and Kopparburg.

The boycott war seems to have gained lots of publicity for GB News even as supposedly their ad revenues are decreasing. This didn’t seem to bother GB News’ chief executive Angelos Frangopoulos when he talked to Business Insider. Attempts to silence them are are part of “cancel culture” on social media, he claimed. GB News have found themselves a target of it but that it’s not shared beyond the “bubble of social media platforms.”

Frangopoulos adds, “The power of some of these social media platforms is quite frankly exaggerated and not reflective of the broader population, particularly on Twitter. … I get many messages saying: “Have you seen this tweet?” And I say no, because I don’t really want to. It doesn’t really matter.”