By now, dear reader, you should already be well aware of the chameleon-like nature of the contemporary left, and its penchant for rapidly adopting and spreading new lingo in order to impose its desires on the world.
A few months ago, we covered the growth of the phrase “stochastic terrorism,” which dates back to the early 2010s. Use of the term has exploded in the past few years as a means to label all anti-left speech as “violence” on the grounds that it “inspires” violent action by others.
Similarly, after the combined victories of Donald Trump and Brexit in 2016, a shell-shocked ruling class elevated to center stage buzzwords like “misinformation” and “disinformation” — terms that previously could only be found in obscure national security and academic contexts. The powers-that-be also elevated the now-ubiquitous phrase “fake news” almost overnight after Trump’s win as an excuse for Hillary Clinton’s defeat—Wikipedia editors first created a page for “fake news” on January 15, 2017.
Today, we shall turn to “brand safety”: another less famous but arguably far more significant and relevant entry in the list of left-wing conceptual neologisms. Despite its name, “brand safety” as currently practiced is not about protecting brands. It is a tactic: a method of engineering censorship under the the flimsy excuse of practicing corporate prudence.
Like stochastic terrorism, brand safety isn’t a completely new concept; it has existed in marketing circles for some time. But just like fake news or stochastic terror, “brand safety” has become a buzzword. The term has absolutely erupted in popularity in just the last few years. The Wikipedia page for “brand safety” was only created in April 2019. The page itself is brief and thinly-sourced. At the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group for websites hosting online ads, the page for Brand Safety is only a few years old and only included the thinnest gruel of content as of late 2020.
A cursory look online reveals that the concept of “brand safety” is absolutely everywhere now—principally in the context of attacking and threatening Elon Musk for loosening censorship on Twitter.
Disgraced former water bottle salesman and current head of the Anti-Defamation League Jonathan Greenblatt has also adopted “brand safety” lingo as of late.
Listen:
The idea of “brand safety” is that companies advertising online should be careful to ensure that their ads don’t appear in the “wrong” venues and next to the “wrong” speech or “wrongthink,” which would in theory tarnish their brands. Of course, with today’s internet, where most ads flow through just a few conduits like Google and Facebook, and where ads are algorithmically targeted at individual persons, the concept of most ads being associated with a website at all is fairly ridiculous.
But brand safety has nonetheless exploded as a concept. Why? For the same reason that both “misinformation” and “stochastic terrorism” took off: because the trope of “Brand Safety” offers a handy justification for what left-wing actors wanted to do anyway—censor and silence their political enemies.
The “stochastic terrorism” justification for censorship relies on hysterical allegations of violence. If a person says anything against the left, then they might “radicalize” somebody else and provoke a bombing or mass shooting. With “brand safety,” things are more subtle. The claim is that brands will be badly “damaged” if they appear on “harmful” websites or TV channels, and so to protect themselves companies should block ads on these platforms, starving them of revenue.
Of course, most of the core ideas of “brand safety” are fake or, at least, greatly overblown.
In the past, brands like Coca-Cola never seemed concerned that their…
Read full story here: The Dark Truth About “Brand Safety:” The Left’s Latest Mafia Shakedown Scam Against Free Speech – Revolver News