Slap in the Facebook
Big firms are refusing to advertise on the social media giant over ‘hate’ posts... but will it work?
SOCIAL media Goliath Facebook might finally be forced to clean up its act, as it faces losing millions from unimpressed advertisers.
Some of the world’s biggest companies – from Starbucks to Ford, Adidas to Lego, Coca-cola to Ben & Jerry’s – are among more than 600 to pull their advertising for the month of July.
It follows claims by campaigners that the US giant has been too slow and reluctant to remove hateful content.
A third of the globe’s top 58 ad spenders will either join the month-long blackout, or are likely to do so, according to the World Association of Advertisers.
Facebook, whose rise from start-up in 2004 to a €598billion beast, earns more than 98% of its revenue from ads, which brought in €62billion last year.
But chief executive Mark Zuckerberg yesterday did not appear overly worried, and is quoted as telling staff: “My guess is that all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough.
“We’re not going to change our policies or approach on anything because of a threat to a small per cent of our revenue.”
Calls to pause advertising began on June 17 after the launch of a campaign led by the US Anti-defamation League and the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.
The move came in the wake of protests after the death of fatherof-five George Floyd, 46, when a white police officer knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes on May 25 in Minneapolis.
There have also been reports that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex asked US civil rights group Stop Hate for Profit to name firms they could “help target” in a bid to dissuade advertisers from using the social network throughout July. Stop Hate for Profit claims Facebook “allowed incitement to violence against protesters fighting for racial justice in America”.
Facebook also came under fire for keeping up a post by US President Donald Trump which said “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”, during the Black Lives Matter protests.
Mr Zuckerberg has agreed to meet campaign organisers and discuss their demands to end “hate, bigotry, racism, anti-semitism and violence” on the platform.
Steve Hatch, Facebook’s vice president for northern Europe, said there is “no tolerance on our platform for hate speech” but that the debates around such issues are “extremely challenging”.
Facebook has launched a campaign to improve people’s awareness of fake news.
And Sir Nick Clegg, the ex-lib Dem leader and Facebook’s global affairs chief, published an open letter to the ad world in which he attempted to downplay fears it had not done enough to combat hate. The backlash is unlikely to derail the Facebook juggernaut on its own.
The top 100 brands which advertise with it accounted for around 6% of revenue last year.
Most of the money comes from eight million smaller advertisers.
There are growing demands to rein in both Facebook and Google’s advertising dominance.
A year-long probe by the UK’S Competition and Markets Authority called this week for a new regulatory regime.
About 80% of around €15.5billion spent on online advertising last year went to Google and Facebook.
Facebook’s average revenue per user has increased from less than €5 in 2011 to more than €50 in 2019.
Google and Facebook’s advertising stranglehold was also having a “profound impact” on newspapers, said the CMA. It found nearly 40% of newspapers’ online traffic came via the two giants.
The regulator’s report said: “Greater competition to Google and Facebook can as a result be expected to improve the quality and accuracy of journalism, and see a decline in the prevalence of so-called ‘fake news’.”
While news of the Facebook ad snub initially wiped billions from the stock market value, it has largely recovered.
The action has also mostly been in the US. But criticism of Facebook’s alleged failure to tackle hate speech only adds to mounting anger aimed at the firm.
One of its weapons is the personal information it holds on billions of users.
It is this which makes Facebook and its subsidiaries Instagram and Whatsapp so addictive for advertisers.
Prising Facebook’s grip off that data, forcing it to be more transparent with the information it holds, could be tough.