Sounds like Verizon's Facebook advertising spend is losing value because of COVID-19, so they're using this a way to redirect focus away from the negative impact on their business.
All of the companies doing this right now are 'pausing spend' rather than redirecting. They're reducing their marketing budgets and pointing the finger at Facebook so no one looks too closely at the implications of their reduced ad spend.
To be fair to Verizon, they have not laid off a single person since March. The retrained 95% of their retail workers to be at home support agents and the rest are still working in their stores for issues that have to be solved in person.
So it makes sense that they would need to cut budget somewhere, since employees is not one of them.
As someone who helps fortune 100 companies with digital marketing, this is cynical view of Verizon and other companies. I am not sure why you are shifting the conversation from advertisers trying to reform FB to advertisers taking advantage of the media pause for positive PR. I don’t believe any of the companies with paused FB campaigns are paused elsewhere. That means Twitter, AdWords, Amazon, affiliate, and CTV spend is live. Digital marketing teams have to make hard decisions and decide how best to communicate with their customers or potential customers. Pausing FB is a step in the right direction. Other organizations have done the same on YouTube. I am as cynical as they come but I don’t see how reduced ad spend is something to hide and blame one single network.
>Sounds like Verizon’s Facebook advertising spend is losing value because if COVId-19
“We’re pausing our advertising until Facebook can create an acceptable solution that makes us comfortable,”
Doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with Covid-19 to me but rather advertisers don’t want to spend money advertising on a platform promoting hate speech.
But let’s say this was a conspiracy by all these companies to save their ad dollars because they are being wasted on FB, why would they be afraid of the “implications of their reduced ad spend”? Certainly there is nothing wrong with these companies coming out and saying we are not going to spend money advertising on FB because it’s a waste of money. What else is the implication?
I suspect COVID-19 is making it easy for a lot of advertisers to drop FaceBook right now. Ad budgets are down and likely to stay down until this blows over.
If a marketing department is just told to reduce spend by 90% they will still be running some of their highest-ROI campaigns on Google and Facebook. Completely pausing Facebook means it's about something more than just budget cuts, because even with a reduced budget marketers always want to have at least a small presence on Google and Facebook since the ROIs are so high for the best campaigns.
The real reason doesn't matter. If a company leaves and says it's due to Facebook's promotion of hate speech then there's no way that company can go back to advertising on Facebook before that changes (it'd look like a change of heart, and that now they think promoting hate speech is OK). Facebook are seeing a drop in ad revenue no matter what, and the only way to get the companies back will be to change. Maybe FB don't care about getting them back, but I suspect that's not likely.
What if they are just , “... pausing our advertising until Facebook can create an acceptable solution that makes us comfortable”? because they don't feel Facebook has acted in a manner consistent with their perceived values?
While they basically advocating banning people in favor of corporate sensibilities. Cannot have something ugly in their ad spaces Normally I wouldn't even care, it is what I expect from ad-tech. But I think I will remember that. There were other companies.
> Sounds like Verizon's Facebook advertising spend is losing value because of COVID-19, so they're using this a way to redirect focus away from the negative impact on their business.
My first thought on all these "boycotts". Are we cynical or is there any proof of this?
I really don't understand this protest at all. If they really care about this, why aren't they pulling from YouTube and Google? Which has very very bad comment sections? I'm not for big corporations calling for people to police speech. Patagonia boycotted Facebook, but they have 13 factories in China...a country with concentration camps for Muslims and political prisoners. A lot of corporate good will falls on deaf ears for me, especially when they have been so silent on issues in China/Hong Kong/Taiwan. Money talks, if this weren't a profitable thing to do, they wouldn't do it.
Verizon also currently appears heavily invested in TikTok which does not have better privacy practices and has yet to deal with many political issues Facebook must today.
I don't have a facebook, so I don't know how they are advertising these days? But I know that on YouTube your ads won't show on objectionable content. Is there a similar system on facebook? Or do your ads show against all content no matter how objectionable it is? If you can't control where your ads are shown, then this boycott doesn't really surprise me.
By way of a contrived example, suppose there is content about a person who was murdered and dismembered on facebook. Well if I'm Ginsu, I'm not sure I want a ginormous ad for my knives next to that content. I wonder if facebook makes guarantees like youtube does with regard to embarrassing situations like that.
Choosing how to spend your own money is hardly 'policing speech'. It sounds more like it's not that you don't understand it but you're set on framing it in a specific way. As you point out, this can lead to hearing loss.
The irony, of course, is that FB bans users left and right for the most mundane things. I follow blog of a poet who stopped publishing on Facebook because his poems get suspended all the time when they mention any issues.
It's a well known left wing ploy. Look at Media Matters for example. They try to shut down speech they disagree with politically by affecting the broadcaster or the platform economically.
The outrage in this thread doesn't make sense to me. This is how advertising works, it's a business decision based on business interests, Verizon doesn't care about any of this one way or another, they are simply taking a stance based on pressure from their customers. What so many of you flippantly dismiss as an outrage mob is a coalition of concerned citizens who believe Facebook is wrong for allowing dishonest political content to disseminate unchecked. It's fine to disagree, but just repeating "censorship" is not convincing, other values exist and compete with the human right to shit-post on social media.
> What so many of you flippantly dismiss as an outrage mob is a coalition of concerned citizens who believe Facebook is wrong for allowing dishonest political content to disseminate unchecked.
So "hate speech" is a synonym for "dishonest political content"? Or are we maybe talking about different things here.
And just repeating "hate speech" is not convincing either, other values exist and compete with the "human right" to not be offended.
At what point would you say Facebook is big enough that they need to be regulated?
In The Philippines, Facebook has a de-facto monopoly on communication.
There are only two major cellphone companies (Globe and Smart), and they essentially just act as last-mile providers for Facebook. Both networks are unreliable, so everyone just has two sim cards. Nobody texts, everyone just uses Facebook messenger and voice chat. Facebook even subsidizes free cellphone plans with access just to Facebook services.
City municipal services were all available primarily via Facebook in the city I stayed in. Cellphone numbers are seen as disposable, especially because the networks are so unreliable. Because nobody else can afford to subsidize the phone companies, nobody can compete with Facebook.
Facebook has an incredible amount of power. They can interfere in elections, and put people out of business with the push of a button. They could hold the entire country hostage.
Is it ok to regulate them then? Or should these leviathan corporations be treated like scrappy startups still?
I don't think people are asking for a FB boycott over "dishonesty", despite the way it is being framed. You literally have organisations like Sleeping Giants whose mission is to convince sponsors to dump sites that host conservative content. The current Facebook boycott is Stop Hate For Profit and is focused around hate speech (using the definition of hate speech as defined by the left).
I lean quite heavily left, I'm Australian and my political compass aligns me the most with our Greens party. I follow news sources from both the left and the right and it seems very obvious that the left is asking for some double standards. Twitter is celebrated online for being woke yet no one sees anything wrong with them for allowing people to commit assault and share it on their platform [1]. I actually find the current US political climate quite worrying, one side is being completely silenced in the mainstream media. I think Democracy needs to have multiple voices.
I hope people turn out and vote in the coming US elections because I suspect the Trump voters are going to come in huge numbers. The conditions of one side being silenced are very similar to 2016. ALL the polls showed a landslide for Hillary because people were too scared to admit they were going to vote Trump.
They own Yahoo and AOL, I'm claiming this is just in-house strategy presented in a theatrical ceremony.
They also own things like HuffPost, Engadget and TechCrunch... It's no secret that Facebook has siphoned news revenue without having to actually do the hard and pricey work of journalism.
Someone probably drew a chart of all of Verizon's properties and figured out that Facebook is an expensive middleman between them.
I'm not a big fan of Verizon but they certainly do know how to run a business.
For all the people mentioning the free speech ramifications, I would like to point to the recommendations from the group leading this boycott[1]. It doesn't seem like any of this is related to free speech. They are asking for extra moderation and support. They also are asking for Facebook to stop profiting from hate speech and misinformation, but they stop short of asking for changes to any policy regarding the removal of content. What is wrong with these requests?
Provide more support to people who are targets of racism, antisemitism and hate
* Create a separate moderation pipeline for users who express that they have been targeted because of specific identity characteristics such as race or religion. This pipeline must include experts on various forms of identity-based hate.
* Create a threshold of harm on the platform where they will put a target of hate and harassment in touch with a live Facebook employee to help them address their concerns.
* Release data from their existing reporting form around identity-based hate. For example, how many reports of hate speech based on race or ethnicity did they get in 2019? How many, and what kinds of actions were taken?
Stop generating ad revenue from misinformation and harmful content.
* Create internal mechanisms (for every media format on every Facebook platform) that automatically remove all ads from content labeled as misinformation or hate.
* Change the advertising portal on all Facebook products to tell advertisers how often their ads were shown next to content that was later removed for misinformation or hate.
* Provide refunds to advertisers for those advertisements
* Prove it: send out an audited transparency report specifically addressing these suggestions.
Increase Safety in Private Groups on Facebook.
* At the request of a member of a private group, provide at least one Facebook-affiliated moderator per group with more than 150 members. Consider more moderators for even larger groups.
* Create an internal mechanism to automatically flag content in private groups associated with extremist ideologies for human review. This content and associated groups would then be reviewed by internal subject matter experts on extremism.
I think the concern is that some people working in tech companies and media may define "hate" as anything to the right of Karl Marx, even well-researched centrist positions.
If this is true, then I can easily see why policing of political content is seen as censorship.
> Private company tells other private company which speech they should be censoring
Welcome to the new era of information folks. You thought private companies were too powerful before, well, guess what? You've now given them the power to control almost all forms of communication.
"But, but, private companies should be able to decide who they want on their platform! What about the free market?"
Wake the hell up. Read up on monopoly. And then read about the network effect. And then go and try starting your own social network that believes in freedom of speech, and convince 1 billion people to join. Then come back and tell me that the private communication industry is a free market.
We need to get corporate interests as far away from political speech as possible.
It's honestly a disgrace these companies are trying to boycott Facebook for not wanting to censor our speech.
We all know the phase "hate speech" is interchangeable with anything that's not deemed advertiser friendly to these corporations.
You think these companies want to advertise against a status update critical of the BLM movement? Of course not. If Facebook buckles to these demands they'll be boycotting Facebook to censor posts critical of political movements they don't like next. We need to stop acting as if billion dollar corporations have our best interests at heart.
While I do believe the Facebook boycott is real, Verizon has a fairly large advertising/media business of their own and so is competitor to Facebook. Not mentioning this as part of reporting isn't great journalism.
I'm not American, I'm not in Facebook either. I've read TFA and still don't have a clue what is Facebook criticized for. What's that hate speech and who's doing it?
This sounds similar to the advertiser boycott that led to demonetization of YouTube channels that were pushing hate content.
I don't know what action FB realistically can take to similarly disincentivize hate content or violence promoting though, since its primary content producers (people who post) are not paid - they are posting for their own sake - so there is nothing to demonetize.
Maybe they can follow Twitter's lead and flag content with warnings, but that seems unlikely given their current stance.
Yes, there a number of reasons to reduce an ad spend, but they also made a point of a key reason:
"Verizon Communications Inc said on Thursday it was pausing advertising on Facebook Inc in July, in support of a campaign that called out the social media giant for not doing enough to stop hate speech on its platforms."
Fiduciary responsibility. The company would not boycott Facebook unless there was at least a business incentive in place. Meaning, even if there are moral concerns, they are entirely secondary to or constrained by business concerns. The opportunism isn't in this subordination, but in the PR that tries to present this as a purely moral decision.
(In any case, the concept and actual use of "hate speech" is dangerous. Laws regulating language that incites violence already exist, but "hate speech" is a phrase often unjustly used to silence people that those using the phrase don't agree with. The better response is to respond with better speech that addresses it or to ignore it.)
FB is also not doing enough to stop spreading false misinformation and propaganda. I have seen a anti-EU page sharing lots of untrue and simplified claims. It is censoring people so after I asked them to provide sources and proofs of these claims or attempted to explain some of them myself, they blocked me. They keep only anti-EU fan comments there. And I can't even report the page to FB as there is no "misinformation" report category. This is slowly polarizing the society and amplifying anger.
I would boycott Facebook for other reasons than them not boycotting Trump ads.
Facebook is simply a TERRIBLE company. They make us lose billions of hours and created a mental health epidemic, especially in teenagers that cannot stop comparing themselves with other's fake life on Facebook. That is a good enough reason to not want to advertise on that platform.
Accusing Facebook in that it’s like accusing sugar companies in diabetes. Not saying the problem doesn’t exist, but maybe they just abuse Facebook? I’m spending around 10 minutes a week in my fb account, checking on friends and family, that’s mostly enough. What stops you from doing the same?
[+] [-] forbiddenvoid|5 years ago|reply
All of the companies doing this right now are 'pausing spend' rather than redirecting. They're reducing their marketing budgets and pointing the finger at Facebook so no one looks too closely at the implications of their reduced ad spend.
[+] [-] jedberg|5 years ago|reply
So it makes sense that they would need to cut budget somewhere, since employees is not one of them.
[+] [-] fumar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway_jobs|5 years ago|reply
“We’re pausing our advertising until Facebook can create an acceptable solution that makes us comfortable,”
Doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with Covid-19 to me but rather advertisers don’t want to spend money advertising on a platform promoting hate speech.
But let’s say this was a conspiracy by all these companies to save their ad dollars because they are being wasted on FB, why would they be afraid of the “implications of their reduced ad spend”? Certainly there is nothing wrong with these companies coming out and saying we are not going to spend money advertising on FB because it’s a waste of money. What else is the implication?
[+] [-] ogre_codes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anoncareer0212|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ponker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhowell|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|5 years ago|reply
Consumer facing telco is booming right now. TMobile has a purple ice cream truck selling phones in my neighborhood.
What is the PR hit of reducing ad spend anyway? Ads are the most liquid corporate spend, it dries up in days if not producing a return.
[+] [-] thefounder|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] raxxorrax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IfOnlyYouKnew|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seppin|5 years ago|reply
My first thought on all these "boycotts". Are we cynical or is there any proof of this?
[+] [-] vvanders|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] partiallypro|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bredren|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bilbo0s|5 years ago|reply
By way of a contrived example, suppose there is content about a person who was murdered and dismembered on facebook. Well if I'm Ginsu, I'm not sure I want a ginormous ad for my knives next to that content. I wonder if facebook makes guarantees like youtube does with regard to embarrassing situations like that.
[+] [-] anoncareer0212|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gadders|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] root_axis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaekash|5 years ago|reply
So "hate speech" is a synonym for "dishonest political content"? Or are we maybe talking about different things here.
And just repeating "hate speech" is not convincing either, other values exist and compete with the "human right" to not be offended.
[+] [-] apostacy|5 years ago|reply
In The Philippines, Facebook has a de-facto monopoly on communication.
There are only two major cellphone companies (Globe and Smart), and they essentially just act as last-mile providers for Facebook. Both networks are unreliable, so everyone just has two sim cards. Nobody texts, everyone just uses Facebook messenger and voice chat. Facebook even subsidizes free cellphone plans with access just to Facebook services.
City municipal services were all available primarily via Facebook in the city I stayed in. Cellphone numbers are seen as disposable, especially because the networks are so unreliable. Because nobody else can afford to subsidize the phone companies, nobody can compete with Facebook.
Facebook has an incredible amount of power. They can interfere in elections, and put people out of business with the push of a button. They could hold the entire country hostage.
Is it ok to regulate them then? Or should these leviathan corporations be treated like scrappy startups still?
[+] [-] MaximumYComb|5 years ago|reply
I lean quite heavily left, I'm Australian and my political compass aligns me the most with our Greens party. I follow news sources from both the left and the right and it seems very obvious that the left is asking for some double standards. Twitter is celebrated online for being woke yet no one sees anything wrong with them for allowing people to commit assault and share it on their platform [1]. I actually find the current US political climate quite worrying, one side is being completely silenced in the mainstream media. I think Democracy needs to have multiple voices.
I hope people turn out and vote in the coming US elections because I suspect the Trump voters are going to come in huge numbers. The conditions of one side being silenced are very similar to 2016. ALL the polls showed a landslide for Hillary because people were too scared to admit they were going to vote Trump.
[1] - https://twitter.com/tariqnasheed/status/1273092750699720709
[+] [-] asdfasdf12124|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kristopolous|5 years ago|reply
They also own things like HuffPost, Engadget and TechCrunch... It's no secret that Facebook has siphoned news revenue without having to actually do the hard and pricey work of journalism.
Someone probably drew a chart of all of Verizon's properties and figured out that Facebook is an expensive middleman between them.
I'm not a big fan of Verizon but they certainly do know how to run a business.
[+] [-] slg|5 years ago|reply
Provide more support to people who are targets of racism, antisemitism and hate
* Create a separate moderation pipeline for users who express that they have been targeted because of specific identity characteristics such as race or religion. This pipeline must include experts on various forms of identity-based hate.
* Create a threshold of harm on the platform where they will put a target of hate and harassment in touch with a live Facebook employee to help them address their concerns.
* Release data from their existing reporting form around identity-based hate. For example, how many reports of hate speech based on race or ethnicity did they get in 2019? How many, and what kinds of actions were taken?
Stop generating ad revenue from misinformation and harmful content.
* Create internal mechanisms (for every media format on every Facebook platform) that automatically remove all ads from content labeled as misinformation or hate.
* Change the advertising portal on all Facebook products to tell advertisers how often their ads were shown next to content that was later removed for misinformation or hate.
* Provide refunds to advertisers for those advertisements
* Prove it: send out an audited transparency report specifically addressing these suggestions.
Increase Safety in Private Groups on Facebook.
* At the request of a member of a private group, provide at least one Facebook-affiliated moderator per group with more than 150 members. Consider more moderators for even larger groups.
* Create an internal mechanism to automatically flag content in private groups associated with extremist ideologies for human review. This content and associated groups would then be reviewed by internal subject matter experts on extremism.
[1] - http://stophateforprofit.org/productrecommendations
[+] [-] hkai|5 years ago|reply
If this is true, then I can easily see why policing of political content is seen as censorship.
[+] [-] treis|5 years ago|reply
I wonder where Facebook could possibly find those experts....
[+] [-] Thorentis|5 years ago|reply
Welcome to the new era of information folks. You thought private companies were too powerful before, well, guess what? You've now given them the power to control almost all forms of communication.
"But, but, private companies should be able to decide who they want on their platform! What about the free market?"
Wake the hell up. Read up on monopoly. And then read about the network effect. And then go and try starting your own social network that believes in freedom of speech, and convince 1 billion people to join. Then come back and tell me that the private communication industry is a free market.
[+] [-] kypro|5 years ago|reply
It's honestly a disgrace these companies are trying to boycott Facebook for not wanting to censor our speech.
We all know the phase "hate speech" is interchangeable with anything that's not deemed advertiser friendly to these corporations.
You think these companies want to advertise against a status update critical of the BLM movement? Of course not. If Facebook buckles to these demands they'll be boycotting Facebook to censor posts critical of political movements they don't like next. We need to stop acting as if billion dollar corporations have our best interests at heart.
[+] [-] topkai22|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anoncareer0212|5 years ago|reply
I hope Zuck has a plan, it's uncharacteristic for him to commit this hard to an approach and not have a way out...
[+] [-] narag|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mchusma|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danans|5 years ago|reply
I don't know what action FB realistically can take to similarly disincentivize hate content or violence promoting though, since its primary content producers (people who post) are not paid - they are posting for their own sake - so there is nothing to demonetize.
Maybe they can follow Twitter's lead and flag content with warnings, but that seems unlikely given their current stance.
[+] [-] consultSKI|5 years ago|reply
"Verizon Communications Inc said on Thursday it was pausing advertising on Facebook Inc in July, in support of a campaign that called out the social media giant for not doing enough to stop hate speech on its platforms."
Short, but insightful article. Worth a read.
[+] [-] bobthechef|5 years ago|reply
(In any case, the concept and actual use of "hate speech" is dangerous. Laws regulating language that incites violence already exist, but "hate speech" is a phrase often unjustly used to silence people that those using the phrase don't agree with. The better response is to respond with better speech that addresses it or to ignore it.)
[+] [-] neop1x|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rainyMammoth|5 years ago|reply
Facebook is simply a TERRIBLE company. They make us lose billions of hours and created a mental health epidemic, especially in teenagers that cannot stop comparing themselves with other's fake life on Facebook. That is a good enough reason to not want to advertise on that platform.
[+] [-] allarm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrkramer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] homero|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gruglife|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boraoztunc|5 years ago|reply