Major ad tech platform shuts out Breitbart for hate speech

One of the biggest digital ad services has banned Breitbart News from its platform for violating its rules against hate speech.

AppNexus said Tuesday that it decided to look into the conservative outlet's content after receiving several complaints following Donald Trump's appointment of Breitbart chairman Stephen Bannon as chief strategist.

The company's audit team found several instances of language they thought had the potential to incite violence. Like many other big ad networks, AppNexus bars sites that traffic in unsavory activities like hate speech, pornography or media pirating.

Bloomberg first reported the news Tuesday afternoon.

While AppNexus doesn't actually count Breitbart among its clients, the ban makes it so that any advertisers seeking to buy real estate on the domain will no longer be able to do so.

AppNexus spokesman Josh Zeitz said he doesn't have any data on how much business brands actually did with the site through its ad tools, but he wouldn't be surprised if it was "sizable" given the scope of the company's exchange.

As the operator of one of the biggest automated ad exchanges on the market, AppNexus is a huge source of revenue for many prominent publishers.

Zeitz said the decision had nothing to do with the publisher's far-right politics.

"We have really strict marketplace rules about hate speech," he told Mashable. "We have no interest in trying to influence what people can and cannot say from an ideological standpoint."

Bannon has boasted that the aggressive conservative blog is "the platform for the alt-right," the white nationalist fringe movement that rose to prominence with Trump's candidacy. The site has been slammed for regularly indulging right-wing conspiracy theories, agitating around racial divides -- it sports a designated tag for "black crime" -- and using anti-LGBT slurs.

The move also comes as major platforms like Google and Facebook grapple with the role they played in spreading fake news in the months leading up to the election.

Zeitz said AppNexus' call had nothing to do with any kind of misinformation; it was based solely on the inflammatory views it found on the site.

A Breitbart spokesperson didn't immediately respond to Mashable's request for comment.

Despite its polarizing content, Breitbart continues to work directly with several major ad tech players.

Google, which counts Breitbart among the thousands of sites that use its AdSense network and DoubleClick publisher ad tools, declined to comment on its relationship with the company.

A spokesperson for ad firm OpenX told Bloomberg that the company is "proud to support a free and vibrant internet."