The Facebook advertising boycott: a storm in a glass of water

Last summer, several large advertisers decided to cut their advertising on Facebook and Instagram. Under the title #StopHateForProfit, the movement wanted to highlight the management of fake news and hate messages by the company of Mark Zuckerberg. A few months later, what remains of this industrial commitment?

Facebook managed to convince one of its biggest customers of its good intentions. Last week, Unilever announced that it would end the boycott of Facebook. In June, the food group pulled all of its advertising campaigns from the social network because of the ‘polarized atmosphere in the United States’. The company believed that Facebook ads at that time offered ‘no added value to people or to society’.

The impact on platform revenues was minimal

But now, Nestlé’s main competitor is seriously considering reusing the world’s most popular social network. “We welcome the commitments made by the platforms to create a healthier environment for consumers, brands and society,” said Luis Di Como, marketing manager for Unilever. He added that the company “will constantly reassess its position on this issue.”

The return of Unilever is the chronicle of a death foretold for the boycott that quickly became irrelevant. The campaign was launched in mid-July by several American civil rights organizations. Among them are the Anti-Defamation League and the NAACP (National Association for the Promotion of People of Color). The hashtag #StopHateForProfit is then used to convince the marketing departments of large companies to stop false advertising. Their main argument was that Mark Zuckerberg did not moderate President Donald Trump’s lies and hate speech on his social network.

Over a hundred advertisers have removed their ads, depriving Facebook of millions of campaigns. But it was a storm in a glass of water. The impact on the platform’s revenues was minimal.

Changes

Unilever agrees to relaunch its advertising campaigns on Facebook, because the firm would have made ‘new commitments’. Effective changes would have been made. Holocaust denial – which refuses to recognize the Holocaust – is no longer allowed on the network. The groups related to the Qanon conspiracy theory are also deleted. The company wants to be more transparent about the mechanisms used to remove hate messages from the platform. There is also a program to prevent small Facebook groups from being incorrectly labeled as promulgating hate messages.

For activist groups, hate speech is far from having disappeared from Facebook. But it was still enough for advertisers. The Digiday site has shown that many advertisers have returned quickly to the social network. And this even before the changes described above. Only 10 companies were still participating in the boycott last week. But with Unilever’s turnaround, the entire #StopHateForProfit campaign is dying in silence.

Source: BusinessAM

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