No matter how woke Facebook tries to be, they'll never be woke enough for everyone.
This is the iconic Life of Brian scene where the rebellious Jews of the People's Front for Judea (or are they the Judean Liberation Organisation?) plot to kidnap Pontius Pilate's wife and forthwith issue their demands.
And what exactly are their demands?
"We are giving Pilate two days to dismantle the entire apparatus of the Roman imperialist state and if he doesn't agree immediately we execute her!"
I was immediately reminded of Life of Brian when reading this document from Stop Hate for Profit:
Recommended Next Steps
On June 17th, we asked companies to act against hate and disinformation being spread by Facebook in our campaign, Stop Hate for Profit. We asked businesses to temporarily pause advertising on Facebook and Instagram in order to force Mark Zuckerberg to address the effect that Facebook has had on our society.
While addressing all of Facebook’s issues and implementing all of our recommendations will take far longer than one month, we wanted to provide clear steps that Facebook could take immediately that would result in real progress. None of these ideas are new, and we hope that Facebook is able to agree and implement the following over the next month:
There then follows 10 demands which this organisation is demanding Facebook submit to, in order to appease brand advertisers who are now pulling their adverts from Facebook at what seems like a swift pace.
Unfortunately (for sane, non far-left Jews like myself) this whole effort is being led by the once Jewish Anti Defamation League, now the ultra far-left ADL. Having been captured by former George Soros trained Obama acolytes, the organisation is unrecognisable from what it was 20 years ago.
The list has been analysed quite well by Casey Newton who writes the Interface newsletter for the Verge (from a left wing and SJW adjacent perspective).
Most of the attention has focused on the Facebook-related aspects of the boycott, so let’s start there: What exactly do the advertisers want? The civil rights group put up a web page with some “recommendations,” starting with hiring a “C-suite level executive with civil rights expertise to evaluate products and policies for discrimination, bias, and hate.” (My sense is that Facebook’s chief diversity officer does at least some of this already, if somewhat informally.) It also asked Facebook to “submit to regular, third party, independent audits of identity-based hate and misinformation.” (Like this one?)
Then there’s a part where they ask for their money back:
Provide audit of and refund to advertisers whose ads were shown next to content that was later removed for violations of terms of service.
The remainder is a mix of requests for things Facebook already does or has a policy against (“stop recommending or otherwise amplifying groups or content from groups associated with hate”; “removing misinformation related to voting”); sort of already has a policy against (“Find and remove public and private groups focused on white supremacy, militia, antisemitism, violent conspiracies, Holocaust denialism, vaccine misinformation, and climate denialism”); and things it thought about doing but decided not to (fact-check political ads).
Casey rather likes the 10'th point on their list:
Enable individuals facing severe hate and harassment to connect with a live Facebook employee. In no other sector does a company not have a way for victims of their product to seek help.
Which to me sounds like an attempt to get Facebook to provide free counseling to millions of millenials with hurty feelings after seeing bad words or gifs.
Casey does point out why Facebook cannot ever police user generated content to the degree which would make the ADL and its fellow censors happy.
This would suggest that what is at stake here, to the extent that the boycott is actually about hate speech, is not what is allowed but what is enforced. And if that’s the conversation you want to have, you need to ask different questions. Questions like: How swiftly should violating content be removed? How much of it should be identified by automated systems? And how many mistakes are you willing to tolerate, both for posts removed in error and posts left up in error?
What makes the last one tricky is that given Facebook’s vast size, even a 1 percent error rate means that thousands of mistakes will be made every day. It’s not possible to let 1.73 billion people a day post freely on your services and have them all comply with your rules. Maybe your reaction to that is that it’s OK, some mistakes are fine. Maybe your reaction is that’s terrible, we should get rid of the law that makes all that posting possible. (This is the stated position of the Republican and Democratic candidates for president.)
And this is what it comes down to:
Or maybe your reaction is, how did Facebook get so big in the first place? Did it maybe buy up its main competition and maneuver other competitors out of the market? Is that why so many of its decisions around content moderation suddenly feel like national emergencies?
But the real money shot comes toward the end of Casey's newsletter and the main reason why I read it. Casey understands the business model of modern social media and can see through the noise. This campaign is, financially, noise for Facebook. It isn't going to bring them down. He first quotes Brian Fung in CNN and adds his comment:
Of the companies that have joined the boycott so far, only three — Unilever, Verizon and the outdoor equipment retailer REI — rank among the top 100 advertisers on Facebook, according to data compiled by Pathmatics, a marketing intelligence firm. In 2019, Unilever ranked 30th, spending an estimated $42.4 million on Facebook ads. Verizon and REI were 88th and 90th, respectively, spending an estimated $23 million each.
The highest-spending 100 brands accounted for $4.2 billion in Facebook advertising last year, according to Pathmatics data, or about 6% of the platform’s ad revenue.
In other words, brand advertisers could all quit Facebook permanently tomorrow and Facebook would still have more than 90 percent of its revenue. And that’s assuming the brand advertisers won’t eventually come back to Facebook — an assumption that, at least for the moment, no one is making. There’s a reason Facebook has more than 7 million advertisers, and the reason is that the ads work.
In many ways Facebook operates the same kind of widely based "value for value" system which the @no-agenda show Podcast operates. The twist is that the value which Facebook sells is YOUR personal information and YOUR attention (if you're still on that platform). They monetise their "users" and sell them to Facebook's real customers, the advertisers.
It is the massively long tail of small advertisers which Facebook is so successfully monetising, not the few big brands at the top.
Of course the reason why this advertiser ban is being so breathlessly and widely covered by the dying old main stream media is precisely because those old media companies are desperately hoping big brands and the massive advertising agencies which they work with, will shift some of their spending back to the old media.
In reality (and Casey also notes this) many brands are cynically using this moment to either cut ad spend or try to claw back refunds or discounts from Facebook as we enter recessionary and rocky economic times.
The much-discussed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act mostly protects companies like Facebook from lawsuits over what their users post. But the ad boycott shows that there are other ways to hold companies accountable, and some of those ways may prove to be more damaging than a court case. I’m skeptical that the ad boycott will have much of a long-term effect on Facebook’s stock price. But a week of big brands making statements that they see Facebook as a home for hate speech seems likely to leave a mark.
Casey's right, this isn't the end of Facebook, but I do think there is a poetic justice for me watching Facebook suffer under an advertising ban, in light of the Crypto Ad Ban Case I've been working on for so long!
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