A pressure group whose aim it is to encourage corporations to stop advertising on media outlets that they say encourage hate speech and extremism has launched a crowd-funding campaign to raise awareness and spread support.

Stop Funding Hate launched the campaign earlier this week, which aims to raise £50,000 on Crowdfunder UK. By Thursday morning it had already raised 5 per cent of that sum.

“We’re challenging the hate campaigns of The Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express by encouraging Britain’s best-loved brands to pull their ads,” the group, founded in August 2016, wrote in its funding pitch.

“Now we want to fund our biggest video campaign yet, including high impact advertising where brands and the public will be sure to see it. We also need resources to set ourselves up for the long-term. Help us cover our running costs and we can change the business model of hate.”

“People have for months been asking how they can support us and donate,” Stop Funding Hate’s founder, Richard Wilson, told The Independent.

“That’s why we decided to launch the crowdfunding campaign.”

Stop Funding Hate urges advertisers to rethink their support for right-wing newspapers over what it sees as misleading headlines about child refugees.

This week The Body Shop, owned by L’Oreal, stated on Twitter that it has no plans to advertise with the Daily Mail. In December, the beauty company had a front-page advertisement on the Mail on Sunday.

In the same week, phone and broadband provider Plusnet pulled an advertisement from The Sun in response to social media backlash and criticism from Stop Funding Hate.

In 2015, The United Nations publicly urged the UK to tackle hate speech in British media, specifically citing an article in The Sun in which migrants were described as “cockroaches”.

Last November, Lego said it would stop advertising its products in the Daily Mail, becoming the first major company to agree to the campaigner’s demands.

The world’s most valuable brands Show all 10 1 /10 The world’s most valuable brands The world’s most valuable brands 1st - Google Google replaced Apple as the world’s most valuable brand, with a brand value of $109.5bn, according to Brand Finance The world’s most valuable brands 2nd - Apple Apple’s brand value declined from $145.9bn to $107.1bn in 2016 The world’s most valuable brands 3rd - Amazon Amazon's brand value rose from $69.6bn to $106.4bn in 2016 Amazon The world’s most valuable brands 4th - At&t Of the 40 telecoms brands in the ranking, AT&T in 2016 overtook Verizon as the most valuable brand rising to $87bn from $59.9bn the year before The world’s most valuable brands 5th - Microsoft Microsoft's brand value rose marginally from $67.3bn to $76.3bn in 2016 The world’s most valuable brands 6th - Samsung Amazon's brand value rose from $58.6bn to $66.2bn The world’s most valuable brands 7th - Verizon Verizon's brand value inched up from $63.1bn to $65.9bn The world’s most valuable brands 8th - Walmart Walmart's brand value rose from $53.6bn to $62.5bn The world’s most valuable brands 9th - Facebook Facebook's brand value increased sharply from $34bn to just shy of $62bn The world’s most valuable brands 10th - ICBC ICBC saw its brand value rise to $47.8bn from $36.3bn. It was the most valuabe financial brand in the world in 2016 replacing Wells Fargo

“Newspaper editors have a strong incentive to run sensationalist anti-migrant headlines: it boosts their readership – and that means they can earn more from advertising,” Stop Funding Hate writes on its website.

“Many of these advertisers have strong ethical stances on other issues: on discrimination in the workplace, on their supply chains, on their role in their communities. But when it comes to choosing which publications they fund with their advertising budgets, their own ethics and values have often been ignored.”

In the US, more than 1,000 companies, including Kellogg’s, BMW, Visa and T-Mobile, have pulled advertising from far-right news outlet Breitbart, according to a database from campaign group Sleeping Giants.