March 29, 2024

Facebook Fails to Appease Organizers of Ad Boycott

There are questions as to how effective the ad boycott will ultimately be in moving Facebook to make changes. In a private meeting last week with employees, Mr. Zuckerberg said he expected advertisers to eventually return to purchasing ads on the platform.

Some boycott participants are pulling ads from Facebook for only the month of July, while others have pledged to stay away until the company makes major changes to its content moderation policies. Several advertisers, such as Unilever, decided to exclude multiple social platforms, such as Twitter.

Most of the protesting companies are still using Facebook to reach consumers, often by posting unpaid content. But this week, the publisher Stuff, New Zealand’s largest media company, said it would experiment with stopping all activity on Facebook and Instagram, having already backed away from advertising on Facebook last year.

The leaders of the ad boycott said that beyond Facebook, all social media companies needed to do a better job of policing content and defending against hate speech on their platforms. But given that Facebook was the largest social network, they said, it deserved the most scrutiny.

Even if Facebook did not feel accountable to the civil rights groups, said Ms. González of Free Press, Mr. Zuckerberg will be testifying in front of Congress on July 27 as part of an antitrust hearing with the chief executives of Apple, Google and Amazon.

“Is he going to come over to the right side of history, or face accountability in other ways?” Ms. González said.

Mike Isaac reported from San Francisco and Tiffany Hsu from Hoboken, N.J. Nicholas Corasaniti contributed reporting from Brooklyn.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/technology/facebook-ad-boycott-civil-rights.html

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