Corporate watchdog SumOfUs is set to deliver a petition with over 140,000 signatures to Shopify‘s headquarters in Ottawa on Thursday, demanding that the e-commerce giant stop hosting right-wing news website Breitbart‘s online store.
The petition will come with an open letter, signed by nearly 2,000 Shopify store owners, that slates Breitbart as “a platform for white nationalists with ambitions to export hateful rhetoric around the world,” and accuses Shopify of “profiting directly from white nationalism and hate.”
The letter claims that over 1,000 companies, including Canadian companies Air Canada, Canadian Tire and Lululemon as well as international giants like Visa and BMW, have ceased advertising on Breitbart.
READ MORE: BMW, other German companies pull advertising from US website Breitbart
Earlier this month, Shopify CEO Tobias Lutke wrote that while he doesn’t like Breitbart or its message, he believes in protecting their right to free speech.
“Instead of imposing our own morality on the platform, we defer to the law,” Lutke wrote in a blog post.
“In the last election, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump used our platform to sell merchandise, as did Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz,” he added
But this doesn’t appear to be enough to assuage SumOfUs and its partner Sleeping Giants, an organization dedicated to stopping the flow of ad dollars to news websites perceived as supporting racist and discriminatory views.
“It is not good enough to claim that you don’t approve of Breitbart. Your decision to continue doing business with it — and in such a public way — is an act of blatant disregard to the people who are and will be most affected by Trump’s policies, and reflects poorly on your company,” the letter reads.
Breitbart is closely linked to the alt-right movement in the United States. Its co-founder Steve Bannon serves as U.S. President Donald Trump‘s chief strategist.
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