The University of Minnesota never made a decision to advertise on Breitbart, the news site often associated with the so-called alt-right, but it won’t be caught dead accidentally advertising there.
Minnesota Daily reports the university yanked its Athletics Department ads from Breitbart because “a small number of people complained about them to the University.”
The few people complaining about ads showing up on a website they loathe don’t necessarily understand how Internet advertising works.
UMinn ads showed up on the site as a result of “a large ad buy through Google” that seeded its ads across a wide number of sites without the university knowing where they would show up. The ads were targeted at internet users “with certain demographic characteristics,” and the university didn’t make a “proactive decision” to seek out Breitbart, as it told the Daily:
“Given the national conversation and controversy around this publication, Gopher Athletics requested that the media buyer pull the ad while we learned more and we shared that initial response with those who had contacted us,” the University said in a statement.
You might remember the university’s fraught history with Breitbart Tech Editor Milo Yiannopoulos, whose campus speech with “Factual Feminist” Christina Hoff Sommers was nearly shut down by protesters this spring.
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