Facebook hate-speech boycott had little effect on revenue
axios.com
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I've worked in advertising for 12+ years. I can easily imagine a company (say, Pepsi), deciding to pause a campaign they were planning to do because they figure the public are not in the mood to see advertising like that. And having nothing in the pipeline to replace it.
So a "boycott" to the public is really just "we don't have much to say right now" in private.
Also, "we need to save a few dollars because our quarterly profits have gone down."
I don't think it was ever any "moral" boycott. It was just an excuse to cut ad spending for a few weeks and avoid being tone deaf during a BLM protest movement.
1) Facebook's reach is unique. If you want to share a message that's important to you with groups of people you care about reaching in the world, there's no better way to reach them at scale.
2) Facebook has had a number of negative sounding news cycles in the past few years (Cambridge Analytica, etc.), and data shows that the average American hasn't changed their behavior based on them. 70% of all Americans and Canadians use Facebook or Instagram at least once a month, and 55% of all Americans and Canadians use it at least once per day. Facebook's monthly and daily user counts have only grown, including this last quarter.
3) Very few advertisers ended up cutting spend during the boycott. Many who did so wanted to cut ad spend in a COVID environment anyway. For instance, Unilever and Coca-Cola also paused Twitter ads, which has nothing to do with the boycott.
4) I myself believe that, at least in comparison to other companies like Google, Facebook does try to police hate speech, and it's a hard job.
2) Daily users/monthly users is not really the stat worth tracking. That number was going to go up because of covid. I wonder about time spent on the site and time spent scrolling. That feels the important metric that has been dropping and tells a different story.
3) doesn't completely tell the story because if coke was cutting anyway that should show up
4) The differences on how each police hate speech doesn't really matter to anyone.
The real reason is 5: 5) Facebook raised prices for everyone else.
Facebook runs a VCG auction and is transparent around how payment works on their site, so there's not really any way for them to "raise prices" singlehandedly outside of this mechanism without being legally liable.
One, I remember a study back when cigarette companies were told they couldn't advertise on television that all major tobacco brands loved this because it meant they didn't have to spend any money on these types of ads. I'm sure there are versions of this all over the place in most marketing strategies.
Two, pardon my cynicism, but I'm sure companies model these things out and take action based on those models. No CEO is just like "yes, let's support a social cause." Randomly picking on a brand, but I'm sure Starbucks started flying a Pride Flag because it made sense to do so for the business.
It was a prisoners dilemma, where the whole industry could be more profitable by cutting advertising, but there was always an incentive to ‘defect’ and advertise your product.
The government banning the ads solved this problem for them.
Without a price change the government can’t benefit because the tax is proportional to the price.
So tobacco companies see a drop in costs, no change in revenue, which results in increased profits.
In the future the government could increase the tax rate, and try to force tobacco companies to drop prices to compensate, which could allow governments to extract the extra profits from reduced adverts. But that doesn’t strike me as the kind of behaviour governments participate in, a little too complicated and risky. Also very likely to have unforeseen consequences as it’s unlikely that every tobacco company was spending the same proportion of revenue on ads.
Not to say that tax rates didn’t go up. Just seems unlikely to be directly linked to the banning of ads. More likely they went up just because they can keep hiking the taxes until all the tobacco companies go bust.
(not making a statement about Tim Cook because I don’t know anything about his positions on gay rights)
Edit: Tim Cook has made numerous public statements in support of gay rights and being gay. My personal favorite: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/24/tech/tim-cook-gay-apple/index...
https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/09/world/oprah-winfrey-racism-sw...
The bigger point is having money doesn’t stop discrimination.
Someone called the cops on Ving Rhames for sitting in his own house.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/actor-ving-rhames-said-...
*I get up, I open the door, there's a red dot pointed at my face from a 9 millimeter, 'Put up your hands.'"
Do they say to each other: "let's pretend we're doing this for a good cause and that it's not just to save money. Let's say this: ... to the public and our customers"
Or do they tend to keep pretending, also when talking with each other in private meetings?
In any case, this situation reminds me of the time when Google exited China and said they were leaving due to censorship concerns. The real reason for leaving was that Baidu had gained an overwhelming share of the search market. I think at the time of Google leaving China, they had less than 5% market share.
Being under attack (not just a verbal attack) by the government seems more of a concern. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
There had been a long string of problematic incidents before that which didn't come into the public though. Frustration and anger about China had been rising for years, and there was a very delicate power balance between Larry, Sergey and Eric going on in which Sergey didn't want to be there, Larry was sort of indifferent (if I recall correctly) and Eric very much wanted to be there. So it led to a lot of tension. When the huge hack happened, it ended up tipping things in Sergey's favour. Probably the lack of ability to make progress in China against Baidu, due almost exclusively due to the PRC's playing-field-tipping incidentally and not Baidu's skill, ended up stripping Eric of most of his intellectual ammo.
I have first-hand seen other channels soak up the FB funds during this time. It has been interesting to see the diversification into media that historically was not a major investment, because it under performed when compared to FB.
This whole thing would've been avoided if Mark grew a pair and permanently banned the first companies who did this from ever using FB services again. I really hope he bans media companies who are trying to extort FB right now, the antics would be dropped quickly.
Overall spending is bigger than blue chips? I feel like that's a citation needed. I've worked for companies spending 1 million+ on twitter advertising channel alone, so I'm curious how SMBs could get anywhere near close that level of spend in one channel per month forget about across multiple.
“We do not make decisions based on petitions”
[1] https://www.boston.com/news/business/2020/07/31/trader-joes-...
2000 is virtually meaningless, in a country of 300 million people, and yet it was getting significant news coverage.
What's funny to me is, at least in my feed, these stories are shared most by people who use them to decry cancel culture. This in turn drives clicks to these stories and creates the demand for them, amplifying the impact of those 2,000 people in exactly the opposite way they intend to.
Anyway, it's possible NYT wrote that article knowing it would be a hot-button article and would be shared widely by anti cancel culture people.
Those not privy are being brainwashed into kowtowing to the whims of the intolerant Twitter mob.
So that whole thing was over something a high school student originally posted?
Not to generalize, but basing business decisions based on something a teenager posted on a website isn't necessarily going to lead to the best decisions.
Teenagers are almost exclusively idiots. By design. They have had almost zero life experience so when someone props them up, as experts or authorities or cares who they are offended on behalf of - I recoil pretty hard at that. Anyone that’s talked to a 16yo for more than a couple minutes knows they certainly shouldn’t be taking any advice from them.
Yet... get the world stage if the cause is good or “good”.
I’m not surprised a teenager’s petition almost effected changed at Trader Joe’s, I’m surprised it didn’t work. Good for them.
How old was the person who wrote in response "The packaging indicates it’s authentic to the country the recipe comes from!" ?
Not to be too cynical, but I doubt many companies give a damn what peoples opinions are, if those people aren’t buying their products, or if there isn’t a creditable threat those people will start to influence the opinions of people who do buy their products.
It's also easier to dismiss with how silly and unimportant (and in my opinion, wrong) their position is - and how obnoxious their self-perceived moral authority is.
Greta Thunberg was rather annoying from a "trotting out a teenager for political purposes" but at least in that case, the moral argument and the "generational" nature of climate change make more sense to see a minor push the issue.
Twitter used to feel like a positive place. But after 2016 it took a dark turn. Trends are overwhelmingly negative, and the platform pushes politics non stop. In the past topics were more varied, divided into categories like tech, or science or music. I just can't escape the political rage promoted by the platform.
But now we live on a planet with almost eight billion people screaming at each other. The criticism of a few means nothing. The old heuristic of counting critics to get a proxy for the opinion of the group doesn't work anymore. But we still fear the rejection of the group, and at some level, deep down, we still interpret an attack from a few people as evidence of deep unpopularity.
Rejecting this instinct is essential for participation in a global conversation. It doesn't come naturally to us, but it can be learned --- just as you can train yourself out of a fear of spiders or heights. It looks like at least some corporate leaders have started to learn the essential skill of not fearing social media loudmouths.
That comment...it's really hard not to take that as a troll comment...
This is exactly what happened to the "OK" hand symbol, which people have lost jobs over: It was a 4chan prank. There were alternate suggestions for what a bunch of different common hand symbols could mean, and this was the only one that caught on mainstream.
The Santa Hat change most likely also made it so much easier to move forward with the renaming of the master branch on GitHub. One could also argue that the master branch name should have been changed back in 2014 in connection with the Ferguson unrest and the killing of Michael Brown.
A Jira ticket was filed the next morning to change all instances of "execute" to "run".
The negative effects of social media tend to be environmental in that sense, threats to national security, destruction of the political climate, negative effects on minorities and so on aren't felt by most customers. The negative behaviour of companies like Facebook affects the commons, not individual customers.
Celebrities such as Elton John and George Clooney had called for a boycott of the Dorchester Collection, a chain of hotels owned by the Sultan of the country, which includes The Dorchester and 45 Park Lane in London.1 Several large companies including JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank followed suit, telling their staff to avoid Brunei-owned hotels in the wake of the new laws.
2018 JANUARY: The Body Shop successfully ended, after the company's owner declared itself cruelty-free. Natura, which bought the high-street chain in 2017, announced a clear animal testing policy after hundreds of consumers wrote to the company. Naturewatch lifted the boycott call, after 11 years of campaigning, and has invited both Natura and The Body Shop to join its list for cruelty-free cosmetics brands.
FEBRUARY: Multiple companies cut ties with the NRA, following boycott calls.
Delta Airlines, United Airlines, Hertz, Budget, Avis, Best Western and Wyndham Hotels all stated that they would no longer offer discounts or other special offers for NRA members. The insurer Chubb dropped cover for NRA Carry Guard insurance. Enterprise Rent–A–Car announced that is was severing ties. First National Bank of Omaha stated that it would end a Visa credit card it offered with NRA branding. The companies all faced boycotts for their links to the NRA after the association called for teachers to be armed and spoke out against student gun control activists, in the wake of the Parkland high school shooting.
JULY: Ivanka Trump closed her fashion brand, after boycotts from consumers following her father's election. The brand was a target of the Boycott Trump campaign due to Ivanka's links with the President and her own role as a senior adviser. According to the Wall Street Journal, which cited research from Rakuten Intelligence, online sales of the brand at Amazon, Macy's and Bloomingdales fell almost 45% in the year to June. Several retailers also dropped the brand.
The Irish Senate approved a bill that would ban the import of goods from the Palestinian occupied territories. If the bill passes Ireland’s lower house it will set a precedent within the EU. The Act will prohibit “trade with and economic support for illegal settlements in territories deemed occupied under international law”, which would make Ireland the first EU country to introduce a national boycott of Israeli-settlement goods. The bill does not name Israel but instead refers to “occupying powers” and “illegal settlements” – both terms that the Israeli settlement fulfil under UN law.
SEPTEMBER: Burberry announces that it will join Armani, Versace, Gucci, Vivienne Westwood, Stella McCartney, and others in banning fur after a long-running boycott campaign from animal rights group PETA.
DECEMBER: HSBC announced that it had fully divested from the Israeli drone manufacturer Elbit Systems, known for selling weapons to the Israeli military used in attacks on Palestinian civilians.
Elbit Systems has been the target of a long-running divestment campaign for supplying surveillance systems and other technology to Israel’s Separation Wall and settlements in the West Bank as well as for the US-Mexico boarder. The company has also manufactured the white phosphorous and artillery systems that can be used for cluster munitions. More than 24,000 War on Want supporters emailed HSBC asking the company to end its investments in Elbit Systems and other arms companies selling to the Israeli military.
Cartier pledged to stop buying gems from Myanmar and gemstone exports from the country fell 65% during the course of 2017. Human rights activists called for jewellers to boycott gemstones mined in Myanmar, which are funding the country’s military.
Myanmar’s military dominates the country’s gemstone industry, with military-affiliated companies controlling distribution of licensing and permits and running gem auctions that raise hundreds of millions of dollars. The long-running campaign, led by SumofUS and The International Campaign for the Rohingya, responds to the military’s attacks on communities of Rohingya Muslims in the country.
I get the feeling that some companies were just posturing with the Facebook boycott, and planned on decreasing their ad spending regardless.
I would have said no. But I can't think why.
Certainly Youtube and the other big monopolies behave like they are not a perfect market.
Every now and again you'll see an article saying it's not known if advertising on the Internet even works that well.
So the opinion is information around advertising is not really fluid enough, not sure in practice.
Perhaps that number provides a false sense of understanding and control and there is an information bias towards it over harder to analyze types of advertising such as radio, but it seems like the ROI for internet advertising would be the most clear.
So we have all these platform vacuuming up massive volumes of personal data so that companies and organizations can target individuals with surgical precision.... and it might not be any more effective on the aggregate than traditional advertising in the 60s.
I don't believe FB is a perfect marketplace because there are too many powerful interests with their thumbs on the scale. If Zuckerberg and crew were actually impartial and objective and wanted a perfect market, which they don't, even if they did want it...could they make it? Where is the line between marketing, lying, up-selling, persuasion, and truth?
I was not commenting on the content on the ads, just the pricing of them.
You would think that bids would eventually become quite economically efficient simply because of how easily conversion can be tracked.
Perhaps those companies in this 'boycott' did themselves a favour by saving money to get by the mounted losses due to the pandemic. Pausing advertising subscriptions to save some money rather than trying to pressurise Facebook to do a u-turn.
This stunt changes absolutely nothing.
Boycotts are always limited in time and scope because if the product wasn't useful you wouldn't need to boycott it, you'd just ignore it in perpetuity. Like, I'm not "boycotting" natural fur clothing for the 20th year, I'm just not interested.
Facebook is useful to both people and businesses and will continue to be useful regardless of any boycotts. Maybe not to some tiny minority of people, but to everyone else.
There are tons of companies that survive with shitty business practices that have much weaker market position than Facebook.
Facebook's grandeur is on display constantly, both in its expansive view of its business model competing against winking at someone on the bus, to the intransigence they express in resisting (if not refusing) any modification to their behavior. They're have toddler-mentality management, and it's a problem that the stock market rewards it.
You don't have power over the fur industry by yourself. The purpose of boycotts is to spread, they aren't a state of being, and in your terms they could be said to be practice in ignoring something. "See? You can go without it."
People and businesses still have MySpace pages, Friendster accounts, and all the kinds of powerless internet presence about which people like to say Facebook is immune, but the future isn't written yet. It stands to reason that Facebook could be the Penny Saver of the future, a webboard for people with online social inertia (I know of webboards that continue beyond decades with much more traffic than a lot of Facebook groups) and a place where yes, your business needs to put up a page.
Facebook would love to be indispensible, and I wouldn't be surprised if they secretly want regulation (on their own terms, of course) because historically that is one method businesses can use to permanently implant themselves in the social fabric. Global reach complicates this, but with the TikTok controversy in the US right now[2], the world may wake up to regional restrictions on business access to individual nations (don't call it a Great Firewall) and we might wake up one day to find Facebook banned in the EU (for example) for their data practices.
There are plenty of smaller social networks in the EU that don't have the problems FB does, and I don't think the users would miss anything more than being asked to friend a friend's friend that you met once (if at all). Everybody would know they have a month or three and in that time everybody sends everybody "I'm @abc123 on $somesite, and @xyz456 on $somesite2." Much easier than the old days of updating paper address books.
And that's the illusion: that there's anything to miss, that it'll be difficult to maintain contact with people. All of the people you know online will still be online somewhere, and you know what? Email still exists. Facebook isn't indispensible.
1. https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Relativ...
2. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
Ad spend for say 5-6 months from Each might be as big as 100-200 million at best.
[1] https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-and-facebook/ (scroll down to "Facebook’s Anti-Fragility" to read the relevant section
You'll notice the article does a good job at mentioning related and mitigating factors (such as "growth was higher the the expectations of some analysts" and "there was also a slowdown in ad revenue due to the pandemic"). But it offers no data whatsoever to directly support its central claim:
"The boycott had little effect on revenue".
Then again, this wasn't a "news article" in the regular sense. Consider the site that it was hosted on, and their overall business model.
That's why I'm leaving it on September 1. I created a special page on my website and a drip marketing campaign for my friends on Facebook: https://www.jeremiahlee.com/posts/delete-facebook/
Instead we are basically begging Facebook to be the one who makes this kind of judgement. Obviously, Facebook doesn't want to do that. Nobody wants to do that.
I'm not talking about obviously blatant cases. I'm talking about a high profile one like Trump tweeting something bad.
Even a senate/former lawyer like Elizabeth Warren doesn't ask for a due justice process. She is also screaming at Facebook to just take down Trump's posts.
I imagine, if what Trump posts is extremely bad and illegal, it won't be hard to prosecute him or get a court order to ban or take down his posts.
(Apology for inaccurate language usage. I'm not familiar with these legal terms. But I hope you get the main idea)
Imagine going out to a bar and some nazi walks in and starts screaming about this or that group that they hate. At the top of his lungs.
Most places would kick his ass right out.
Those that didn't, the customers would probably leave.
Social media is a bit more complex than all that, but in some cases, it really is like that bar where the guy stays, and invites his buddies, and no one normal wants to go there.
Many activists would prefer that we didn't have this prohibition, but they don't have the political clout to get it repealed --- rightly so, because despite everything that's happened, explicit censorship is very unpopular.
Because the activists can't get the state to censor the public, activists have used increasingly underhanded tactics to get tech companies to censor the public. They've been very successful so far, but there's a growing resistance to their antics.
To the extent that they can make the argument free speech vs. not free speech, of course they win hearts and minds, because as you say, censorship isn't very popular.
The problem is that by making this all about censorship, they can ignore any responsibility they for harm they create in other ways. For example, creating incentives for publishers to create divisive content for the sake of enraging people, or recommending people join white supremacy groups. As far as I can tell, it was these sorts of measures that the boycott organizers called for.
The cynicism of Facebook's PR “free speech” stance is especially annoying given their arbitrary and non-transparent block of Dreamwith a few weeks ago[2]
1. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-employ...
I'll quote a paragraph of http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
> We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention.
The most interesting part is that the content that was classified as "divisive" when that essay was wrote is not the same that is classified as "divisive" now.
Whether you want to call this “divisive content” (which definition fits it pretty neatly, in spite of PG's good essay) or “scissor statements” or something else is up to you, but it's a real phenomenon.
It is not only used in social media sites, it is also used be journalist in newspaper and TV. (Sometimes it is more evident is the sport section. Every time the national soccer team lose a match, there is a tempest in a teapot about each one of the decisions of the team manager and the players.)
But that does not follow. Mostly, when people have trouble calling something false, it's because it is obviously ambiguous and the meaning is disputed. The point of words like "inappropriate" and "divisive" is to shift to something less easily disputed.
It's that Facebook shouldn't be the one who makes that judgement.
And that's my point. We should get a court to make that judgement.
As a society, there doesn't seem to be a solution.
I don't think I agree with that.
We don't, and it isn't, at least not in the US.
4. Find and remove public and private groups focused on white supremacy, militia, antisemitism, violent conspiracies, Holocaust denialism, vaccine misinformation, and climate denialism.
6. Stop recommending or otherwise amplifying groups or content from groups associated with hate, misinformation or conspiracies to users.
7. Create an internal mechanism to automatically flag hateful content in private groups for human review. Private groups are not small gatherings of friends - but can be hundreds of thousands of people large, which many hateful groups are.
So while they do want other things as well, the censorship seems like a pretty central part of the platform.
Still, it gets to my point that 7 or (arguably) 8 of the 10 demands do not directly call for censorship.
Should it be Facebook or our justice system?
I'd rather not have Facebook do that.
Using Facebook as a judge becomes more like popularity contest with who can scream the loudest and are willing to harass Facebook employees for results.
> The problem is that the speech that these people want censored isn't illegal.
Please excuse my little legal knowledge. But I thought hate speech and fake news were illegal.
She doesn't want to go the legal route because she knows she'd lose. Free speech protections in the United States are ironclad. In other jurisdictions, e.g., Germany, they're not so strong and activists in those countries have succeeded in making the state compel tech companies to censor. This approach will not work in the United States.
> Please excuse my little legal knowledge. But I thought hate speech and fake news were illegal.
One of the most infuriating habits of the authoritarian activist types is their way of pretending that whatever they don't like is de jure illegal. That they've convinced people that there's some law against "hate speech" is sad.
No, hate speech and fake news are not illegal, nor should they be: any prohibited category of ideas invariably expands to encompass whatever it is that the people defining the category dislike. The strict American prohibition of censorship is the product of centuries of experience in England with exactly this sort of creeping totalitarianism. Humanity has not changed since then. Power still corrupts.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
Nor, 99% of the time, particularly hateful.
Lol. Yeah, we should totally ban “bad speech”.
By bad speech, I mean the ones that a lot of people (e.g. Warren) were yelling at Facebook to ban the accounts/posts.
I would appreciate if you try to get the main point. Thank you
The term 'justice' implies government. The administering of justice is ostensibly function of government, not private entities like Facebook. The unspoken understanding that perhaps you are missing is that it is taken as given that any 'justice process' created to prevent and/or punish unpopular speech will ultimately be abused and extended to effectively all meaningful speech that the Powers That Be (kings, presidents, whomever) don't approve of. That understanding comes from the experience of history and was the basis for the 1st Amendment of the US constitution.
It is certainly true that in many places on Earth 'wrong' speech is criminal and is prosecuted. In the US the attempt to outlaw speech or prosecute people for their speech is what is considered 'wrong' and 'bad.' Those points in history when these principles were violated are understood to be mistakes and aberrations.
So you don't get very far in the US with ideas of making speech into a matter for law enforcement or courts. With a few narrow exceptions we don't entertain these ideas and we don't reward anyone that tries it, or even suggests it, as you can see from the moderation.
> By bad speech, I mean the ones that a lot of people (e.g. Warren) were yelling at Facebook to ban the accounts/posts.
Senator Warren's views do not have the force of law and no one in the US is required to honor them. Further, Senator Warren's opinions are not universal. Giving Senator Warren the ability to control what expressions Facebook does and does not permit would require something on the order of revolution, probably violent.
And both sides think that they that support free speech. But free speech mean to them speech they agree with, and everything else is a hate speech.
How does the performance of the ads compare to Facebook's competitors? (Snapchat, Google, Twitter, Pinterest, etc)