There are a million businesses they could target as bad for the environment. Like, I don’t know, oil companies. Oil companies whose product they use to make their fleece.
Instead they go after a company that is moving to carbon neutrality, why? Because they don’t want to pay for advertising and would rather get free PR from the media, who also hates Facebook.
It is a PR strategy from Patagonia, but not necessarily for sales. For as long as Chouinard is steering the ship, Patagonia's goals are much broader than financial success.
Corporate activism frequently does seem to be a bit about PR but Patagonia is one of the best examples we have of it in practice.
Of course, my consumer choices are absolutely negligible and the most significant thing I can do by far is vote and advocate for the climate. Fussing over my consumer choices is penny-wise and pound foolish, and the fossil fuel industry and other polluters bank on convincing consumers that if they just buy the stuff with the faux burlap packaging the climate will be just fine.
Similarly, whether I use Twitter/etc or not won’t move the needle on the harm they do to our democracy. Systemic problems like these aren’t significantly altered by individual choices to partake or abstain—political intervention is required. And of course, comparing HN to Twitter and Facebook is just absurd.
And yet, aggregating over the populace, this mindset that "my choices are negligible (it's the non-climate-change-voting populace's consumption that's the problem), and it's penny-wise and pound foolish to focus on my choices" is actually penny-foolish and pound foolish. You (and I) are in fact yet another consumer they've convinced that our choices are "negligible".
the market has decided that FB is now the poster child for bad business behavior.
That is, it makes financial sense for (some) companies to disengage from the FB brand.
For a company whose business models rely on leveraging social network dynamics to sell more ads, it seems welcomingly ironic that FB should be labeled the social pariah, if even for a short moment in time.
(let's hope it sticks)