"While big brands can afford to pause their addiction to Facebook, most advertisers cannot participate, as they have become so dependent on Facebook’s ad-targeting tools.
Is July’s advertiser boycott of Facebook a reaction to the ongoing pandemic, or the summer’s protests, or the upcoming autumn election? Yes.
According to the organizers’ public spreadsheet listing advertisers pledging to support the #StopHateForProfit boycott, nearly 1000 companies had signed on at the time of this writing. The list encompasses automakers (Acura) to jewelry retail (Zales) but reads like a who’s who of socially conscious companies.
Some members of the founding coalition leading the effort were invited to a meeting with Facebook executives on July 7, but it proved unproductive as the company emerged defiant and the civil rights groups deflated and disappointed. Even though Sheryl Sandberg expressed a preference for “listening” to civil rights groups and its internal audit rather than its boycotting customers, Mark Zuckerberg signaled that he would consider a key demand from the coalition and establish a senior vice president of civil rights. But he did not budge on the proposal to issue refunds to advertisers whose ads appear on hateful and unsafe content.
This Facebook boycott campaign harnesses the moment. In the absence of a highly functional democracy, civics and social justice become duties reluctantly adopted by corporates responding to market forces and public relations. When silence is assumed complicity, inaction is an action, thrusting brands into conflict. Commerce is unavoidably politicized among fractured and plagued publics.
It’s easy to be skeptical about the sudden rise of advocacy coalitions organizing and amplifying the #StopHateForProfit campaign that’s pressuring companies to withhold their spending on Facebook to force change. How does one challenge Facebook’s multi-sided market and data-driven cultural dominance? Perhaps perspective into the political economies of Facebook’s actual customers—advertisers—reveals the paradox of this particular revolt. Pressed to realize that their dependence on the platform further dissolves boundaries between their corporate responsibility and their bottom line, advertisers may be realizing that the precision-targeted marketing utopia they demanded has had dystopian downstream effects on civil society."
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