Merchants of Mayhem: How to Shut Down the Business of Hate

A unique playbook for fighting the flood of disinformation--not by correcting lies but by targeting the businesses that fund them.

Disinformation is a powerful weapon. Its goals are to divide and demoralize us -- and to make a mountain of money. Politicians and media personalities use it to amass power through lies and distractions. Well-intentioned watchdogs and independent media try to fight these tactics by correcting falsehoods and exposing the truth--but they’re not winning.

Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin have a better plan of attack: follow the money. In 2016, Jammi began looking into the advertising revenue that powered Breitbart news, the hostile disinformation site that helped propel Donald Trump to the presidency. She found that major companies like Uber and BMW were unwittingly advertising on the site, and through public pressure, she got those companies to withdraw their ads, causing Breitbart’s revenue to drop 90% and weakening its influence. In the years since, she has partnered with Atkin to found Check My Ads, an organization that exposes funding for dangerous disinformation, fake outrage campaigns, and other political scams. Together, they have become five-star generals in the information war.

In Mayhem Merchants, Jammi and Atkin expose the truth about how disinformation really works. It takes more than clever tactics to manipulate voters and consumers--you also need resources. And many supposedly apolitical companies are spending and making money in this trade, sometimes without even knowing about it. Disinformation is a big and dangerous business, a looming threat to democracy. By showing how it works, they can teach us all how to stop it.

Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin are cofounders of Check My Ads, the adtech industry’s first watchdog. Their work dismantling the ad-funded disinformation economy has been featured in the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Guardian, WIRED, and more. Check My Ads was also named by Fast Company as one of the Most Innovative Media Agencies in the world.

In 2016, Nandini co-founded Sleeping Giants, which launched the social media campaign that resulted in advertisers fleeing Breitbart after the 2016 U.S. elections. At Sleeping Giants, she led campaigns that convinced advertisers to cut ties with The O’Reilly Factor and Tucker Carlson Tonight on the Fox News Network. The campaign won a Cannes Gold Lion and a Webby Award for Public Service & Activism.

Prior to this work, Nandini was a marketing leader for tech startups in London and Berlin. She graduated from the University of Maryland’s R.H. Smith School of Business with a degree in Marketing. Claire is a tech marketer and has a certificate in International Election Observation from the Global Campus for Human Rights and a master’s degree from the University of McMaster in Ontario, Canada.