Follow the Money: Analyzing @slpng_giants_pt's Strategy to Combat Misinformation

In 2020, the activist movement @sleeping_giants_pt (SGB) made a splash in Brazil. Similar to its international counterparts, the movement carried "campaigns" against media outlets spreading misinformation. In those, SGB targeted companies whose ads were shown in these outlets, publicly asking them to remove the ads. In this work, we present a careful characterization of SGB’s activism model, analyzing the three campaigns carried by the movement up to September 2020. We study how successful its complaints were and what factors are associated with their success, how attention towards the targeted media outlets progressed, and how online interactions with the companies were impacted after they were targeted. Leveraging an annotated corpus of SGB’s tweets as well as other data from Twitter and Google Search, we show that SGB’s “campaigns” were largely successful: over 83% of the requests (n=192) were acceptably answered, and, for those that received an answer, we find user pressure to be negatively correlated with the time companies take to respond (r=-0.67; p<0.001). Finally, we find that, although changes in the interactions with companies were transient, the impact in targeted media outlets endured: all three outlets experienced a significant decrease in engagement on Twitter and search volume on Google following the start of SGB’s campaigns. Overall, our work suggests that internet-based activism can leverage the transient attention it captures towards concrete goals to have a long-lasting impact.