Verizon is the latest company, and far and away from the largest, to join an ongoing Facebook and Instagram ad boycott, the cell carrier announced Thursday. The boycott, organized by the Anti-Defamation League, is in response to President Donald Trump’s handling of incendiary posts by the social media giant, as well as ongoing misinformation issues that have intensified in recent weeks due to protests against police brutality and racism, and other news events that have exposed Facebook’s moderation approach to the flaws.
Verizon includes Ben & Jerry’s ice cream company and several outdoors and leisure apparel brands, including The North Face and Patagonia, as well as film distributor Magnolia Pictures in the boycott. Several digital ad agencies have also started advising customers on how to participate and one, i360, has expressed public support, reports The Wall Street Journal.
“We have strict content policies in place and have zero-tolerance when infringed, we are taking action,” Verizon’s chief media officer John Nitti said in a statement to CNBC. Verizon ranked 78th in the list of top Facebook marketers between May 22nd and June 20th, 2020, reports CNBC’s Meg Graham, investing nearly $ 1.5 million.
The participating companies, including Verizon, say they intend to pull ads throughout July but then resume buying on Facebook. Verizon did not give any concrete reasoning regarding the move. But the company’s move aligns with the requests laid out in an ADL open letter to Facebook marketers released earlier today that used Verizon as an indicator of Facebook’s shortcomings, recounting how one of the company’s advertisements was discovered running against a thread supporting the QAnon fringe conspiracy theory.
The letter is part of the wider protest campaign by the ADL, entitled Hitting Pause on Hate, aimed at penalizing Facebook for its failure and trying to influence the company to change its policies. The campaign incorporates many of the same strategies that were used to motivate YouTube’s unprecedented protest to equivalent and ongoing censorship battles over the video platform in 2017.
“What are they doing with $70 billion in revenue and $17 billion in profit?” begins the ADL open message. Their services to the victims of harassment are inadequate. The proximity of their publicity placement to hateful content is haphazard. And their audit of transparency reports on ‘civil rights’ is not helpful to the civil rights community.
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For other companies involved in the boycott, the indecision about Trump tweets calling for violence against protesters and other forms of state action has been a point of contention with the social network. In the past month, Facebook has taken steps to try and deal with the controversy. Zuckerberg has spoken openly about his decision-making in public comments, and the organization recently agreed to drop Nazi-imaged Trump campaign ads.
Originally, Twitter called the video’s tweet version “manipulated media,” as it mistakenly appeared to display CNN maliciously editing a video that it never aired in the first place. Yet both sites pulled the footage after one of the Toddlers’ parents featured in the clip lodged a copyright lawsuit.
Conclusion:
Facebook joined Twitter in deleting a fabricated photo of two Trump babies reposted from a common far-right troll page that Twitter later removed on permanently.
