↓  Skip to the how-to  ↓

Last year, Media Lens wrote:

It is obvious that the right-wing press – the Daily Mail, the Sun, The Times and Telegraph – play a toxic role in manipulating the public to favour elite interests. But many people are now realising that the liberal press is actually the most potent opponent of progressive change.

Our own work highlighting the Guardian's hostility toward Jeremy Corbyn was shared widely on social media. It even resulted in the hashtag #BoycottTheGuardian trending on Twitter (thanks to the excellent LuckyHeron).

Commenting on why the Guardian appeared to have misread the public mood in its attacks on Jeremy Corbyn, journalist Matt Kennard wrote:

'The Guardian didn't get it "wrong". It is the mouthpiece of a liberal elite that is financially endangered by a socialist program.'

Media Lens go on to write:

In truth, the Guardian sought to destroy Corbyn long before he became Labour leader (see here and here). This means that it did not target him because he was an ineffective leader imperilling Labour. And this hostility was no aberration, not a well-intentioned mistake that they got 'wrong'. To this day, the Guardian remains Blair's great cheerleader, despite his awesome crimes, just as it was Hillary Clinton and Obama's cheerleader, and just as it was Bill Clinton's before them.

The Guardian "earning off the back of popular outrage"

Despite widespread awareness that the Guardian is no friend of the left, and growing support for the boycott of the paper, many activists and social media users still inadvertently support the Guardian by sharing links to its articles on social media.

The Guardian goes to great lengths to attract advertisers and earns a lot from it. While it's important to highlight and criticise the Guardian's output and the role it plays in spreading propaganda, we shouldn't be sending visitors to the site when doing it. Especially as popular outrage often drives more traffic to the Guardian than even the Guardian's own social media accounts.

It doesn't matter what your view of the Guardian is or how scathing your criticism, by sharing its links you are not only increasing their share count, you are sending visitors to the site to get exposed to advertising and inflating the site's visitor numbers. Each time you share a link to the Guardian, you help the Guardian.

An easy solution is simply not to share anything from the Guardian. Even if it's a good piece you agree with, don't share it, don't send them the traffic. Even better, explain why you're not sharing. Send a link to this page if you like.

Despite the growing awareness of the Guardian's propaganda role — thanks to groups like Media Lens and people like Jonathan Cook, Mark Curtis and John Pilger, who have spent years highlighting and challenging its output — the paper is still seen by many, as Jonathan Cook puts it, "the house journal of the left." Making its influence "far more pernicious than other media." So it's still important to explain why the Guardian shouldn't be trusted, and to continue to highlight its propaganda role in society.

So how do we share Guardian articles without supporting the site? Here are our suggestions:

1. Don't share links, share screenshots

Instead of sharing a link to the Guardian, take a screenshot of the Guardian article from your phone or your computer and share that. Usually a screenshot of the headline will do, but some people share the entire article in this way. You can of course crop the screenshot image and make annotations before sharing to highlight any part you want.

Examples

Headline Headline and intro Entire article

2. Don't retweet links, share screenshots

When you see a tweet worth sharing, if it includes a link to the Guardian, don't retweet it. Take a screenshot of the tweet and share the screenshot instead. Additionally, if you like, send the Twitter user a link to this page to let them know they can link differently in the future.

Example

Media Lens sharing tweet screenshot

3. If you link, use DumpTheGuardian.com

If you want readers to be able to click through and read the content for themselves, edit the URL to the Guardian article you're about to share and simply add 'dump' in front of the domain name.

www.theguardian.com/…www.dumptheguardian.com/…

The rest of the URL can stay the same. Anyone who clicks on the link will then reach our page which will automatically forward them on to an archived copy of the Guardian article hosted by the non-profit Internet Archive project.

Why an archived copy?

The Guardian is very much an ad-driven business. Archiving sites like web.archive.org and archive.today prevent the display of advertising that would normally make the site money. Additionally, viewing an article this way doesn't count as a page view for the Guardian, so hurts its visitor numbers and ability to attract advertisers.

There are other benefits too, as Julian Assange's twitter account explained in a tweet to Mark Curtis:

If you archive the site first ... then tweet the archived URL, the Guardian gets no revenue when you tweet the link. We do this to stop perverse incentives, namely, earning off the back of popular outrage at fake news. Additionally, the Guardian keeps internally scores as to how many reads each author has received, which factors in to promotion and retrenchment.

Example

Using dumptheguardian.com

Get shareable link

Enter a Guardian URL below and we'll give you a link you can use on social media:

4. Link directly to the archived copy

If you're linking, we recommend option 3 above as that is the easiest and fastest way to share an archived copy hosted by the non-profit Internet Archive project.

But you can also build the links directly through the Internet Archive by following these steps:

  1. Visit the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine
  2. Find the 'Save Page Now' section in the bottom right
  3. Paste the Guardian URL in the field and click 'Save Page'
  4. Wait for it to finish saving the page
  5. At the top right you'll see small Twitter and Facebook icons you can use to share the page. Alternatively, you can copy the URL in your browser's address bar and use that.

Note: Many articles will already have been archived, so you can also paste the article URL in the large field at the top of the site first, to see if there's already an archived copy you can link to.

Example

WikiLeaks linking to archived copy

Help!

Screenshotting on your phone

Screenshotting on your computer

If you have questions or need support with any of this, please email us [email protected] or tweet us.

 

Privacy

The domain dumptheguardian.com is operated by FiveFilters.org. We do not log visits nor your IP. We do cache (store temporarily) metadata associated with Guardian articles and their archived copies to ensure we can redirect you to the archived copy as quickly as possible.

 

How to share Guardian articles
Please share this guide

email facebook twitter