
Facebook hate-speech boycott had little effect on revenue - hhs
https://www.axios.com/facebook-hate-speech-boycott-had-little-effect-on-revenue-15984194-124e-41e0-821b-cc3a1b29e28d.html
======
unreal37
I really question what the real purpose of this "boycott" was during a
pandemic.

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.

~~~
adtechanon
Throwaway account from an established HN person. I work with many of the top
advertisers in the US. These are not simply PR positions that take advantage
of lower marketing expenditures. Many of the top advertisers do not support
Facebook’s current advertising and content policies. Would you as a savvy
marketer turn off your top 1 or 2 channel instead of lower performing
channels? Facebook is typically in the top for both branding and performance
media. Wouldn’t the marketing teams save money and maintain healthy
performance by shutting down other channels? Facebook has a closed marketplace
that protects itself, and gives malevolent actors (certain advertisers) the
power to manufacture misinformation at a global scale.

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.

~~~
wolco
Is it the ad execs at company 1 & 2 calling the shots or is this a board level
decision?

------
seibelj
Could it be that the loudest and angriest twitter scolds actually represent
~0.0001% of the population and shouldn’t be immediately kowtowed to by our
academic, cultural, and business leaders?

~~~
cal5k
Companies should be accountable to their customers, not activists.

~~~
sharken
Tell that to Microsoft who removed the santa hat from Visual Studio Code due
to one user. Ironically the issue currently has 18 down-votes.

[https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268)

~~~
grawprog
>The Santa Hat on vscode insiders and pushing of religion is very offensive to
me, additionally xmas has cost millions of Jews their lives over the
centuries, yet even if that was not the case, pushing religious symbols as
part of a product update is completely unacceptable. Please remove it
immediately and make it your top priority. To me this is almost equally
offensive as a swastika.

That comment...it's really hard not to take that as a troll comment...

~~~
glerk
Poe's Law strikes again. It is scary to see how swiftly Microsoft acted here,
it seems like malicious actors could easily weaponize this.

~~~
Izkata
> it seems like malicious actors could easily weaponize this.

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.

------
DevKoala
From my perspective tons of advertisers stopped spending in late Feb/March
across multiple channels, not only Facebook. This was necessary for
advertisers to re-evaluate how they would allocate their budget and change
their messaging. Things are back in full force now.

I get the feeling that some companies were just posturing with the Facebook
boycott, and planned on decreasing their ad spending regardless.

~~~
christophilus
This is it. It was nothing but a PR explanation of an already planned budget
cut.

------
MattGaiser
Aren't Facebook ads essentially a perfect market (in the economic sense) if
done properly? Even if someone drops out, there would be someone with a
slightly lower bid just behind them.

~~~
aaron695
That's a pretty interesting question.

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.

~~~
MattGaiser
The bit on internet advertising not working that well is interesting given
that all the startups I know can tell you (to the cent) what it costs to
acquire a customer.

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.

~~~
cwhiz
My understanding is that the average of average costs to obtain a customer is
relatively unchanged over the years. Even going back to well before the
internet existed, the numbers are relatively equal.

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.

[https://www.nber.org/papers/w20171.pdf](https://www.nber.org/papers/w20171.pdf)

------
rvz
Obviously.

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.

~~~
gfosco
Considering this, was the tech and other media coverage of the "boycott" fair
or accurate? Really looks like it was agenda-driven activism itself.

------
sinsterizme
I never understood the appeal of decentralized social media platforms until
now. How does it make sense for large centralized platforms to police their
platform for every little thing that the current social environment finds
unacceptable? People should be able to organize themselves into groups as they
see fit and no unilateral decision should have final say in a global
community's thoughts and discussions

------
rhizome
One month was always going to be too little. FB can ride it all out, and if I
take a step back I wonder if they can be moved with financial attacks at all.
I feel the greatest weaknesses they have, and which they can't defend against,
are with reputation and MAUs.

~~~
clusterfish
The twitter mob can boycott Facebook all they want, for a month or a year, but
the vast majority of people and businesses will go on using it because that
makes no difference to them.

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.

~~~
rhizome
Well I don't think FB is so fungible as a market participant that they can be
excused via relative privation[1]. They have close proximity to the lives of a
lot of people, and the content that appears on their pages plays a prominent
role in society, or at least the FB userbase. To be sure, sometimes its role
in society is a result of splash damage.

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...](https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Relative-
Privation)

2\. [https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/ne...](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/news/tiktok-ban-us-trump-why-will-it-happen-remove-app-what-
countries-a9618931.html)

------
bigcloud1299
This boycott generally is a signal to competitors that let’s not compete at
this time where our revenue may impact. The competitors can’t have a meeting
about it so this is how they signal each other. If the company competitors
follow would mean you are both going maximize your profits e.g raise prices or
not cut them via promotions. During the pandemic the sales of Pepsi and coke
are already hurting due to commercial sales.

Ad spend for say 5-6 months from Each might be as big as 100-200 million at
best.

------
nstart
Look like Ben Thompson was right when he predicted the end outcome of this on
Facebook's revenue [1]. He looked at the financials and noted that the real
players on Facebook were the small companies looking to leverage the scale and
automation of Facebook to pull customers away from the big players in ways
that were never possible. He predicted that once the big players pulled out,
automation would kick in, buying prices would be lowered, and spends by small
players looking to take advantage of this would be more likely to go up.
Fascinating to see how this has eventually played out.

[1] [https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-and-
facebook/](https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-and-facebook/) (scroll down to
"Facebook’s Anti-Fragility" to read the relevant section

------
vanusa
_Facebook hate-speech boycott had little effect on revenue._

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.

------
bitxbit
Expected since the uptick in ad money came from all the smid companies going
full e-commerce as well as new categories such as masks.

------
DeonPenny
Good, twitter ethics are illiberal and should be taken seriously. The big
problem with ideas are who the judge is and it always tilts towards tyranny.

------
jeremiahlee
It takes two—advertisers and us using Facebook—in order for Facebook to make
money. Advertisers are only on Facebook because we are on Facebook. Facebook
won't change until people start leaving it.

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/](https://www.jeremiahlee.com/posts/delete-facebook/)

~~~
jeremiahlee
Why the downvotes?

------
WhompingWindows
Facebook has our attention, they built their platform to scale rapidly and
hold our attention effectively. Now, they are a massive force with 9 million
advertisers. 9 MILLION advertisers, all vying for the attention platform they
have built.

------
ergocoder
I don't understand why none pushes for a justice process for taking out hate
speech and bad speech.

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)

~~~
quotemstr
The problem is that the speech that these people want censored isn't illegal.
We have a strong constitutional prohibition against censorship.

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.

~~~
paulgb
One of the most successful PR strategies Facebook has used throughout this is
to position it as a free speech issue and the boycott as calling on them to
censor speech. It's been so successful that I've seen it repeated a number of
times on HN.

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...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-employee-
leaks-show-they-feel-betrayed)

2\.
[https://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/3861716.html](https://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/3861716.html)

~~~
gus_massa
> _create divisive content_

I'll quote a paragraph of
[http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html](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.

~~~
paulgb
Whatever you want to label it, surely I'm not the only one who has observed
that the best way to get an article shared on social media is to amp up how
controversial it is. Then people who agree share it to agree with it, and
people who are enraged by it share it because they are enraged by it.

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.

~~~
gus_massa
I agree, but I prefer to call them "flamewar topics".

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.)

------
toephu2
Does anyone here run ads on Facebook?

How does the performance of the ads compare to Facebook's competitors?
(Snapchat, Google, Twitter, Pinterest, etc)

