The Sun newspaper has deleted without any note the infamous and heavily-criticised article by Katie Hopkins calling refugees escaping Syria “cockroaches”.

The decision is likely to have come after Stop Funding Hate, a campaign to encourage advertisers to stop spending money with hateful tabloids, started gaining pace.

The popular campaign now has over 200,000 supporters on Facebook and over 60,000 followers on Twitter.

It has been encouraging supporters to bombard advertisers with the Katie Hopkins article over the last few days.

@StopFundingHate @johnlewisretail does this look like an advert you can be proud of? Luxurious cashmere or gunboats? #StopFundingHate pic.twitter.com/rA436BpEp3 — Suzi Harris (@suzannacorfu) December 13, 2016

It seems the Sun has now taken the article off their website (hat-tip @jpublik)

The link now includes a ‘legal removal’ addition in the URL and the page shows a ‘Not Found’ message.

Finding the article through Google also gives an error message on the original URL.

It seems a campaign to target advertisers has had more success than online petitions.

Stop Funding Hate recently had success with convincing Lego to pull an advertising campaign with the Daily Mail. Other campaigners in the US have managed to get Kelloggs to pull advertising from the conspiracy site Breitbart.

We’ve contacted the Sun for a comment.