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Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

reuters.com

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Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#11

Post by jedberg »

forbiddenvoid wrote: post #6

Sounds like Verizon's Facebook advertising spend is losing value because of COVID-19, so they're using this a way to redirect focus away from the negative impact on their business. All of the companies doing this right now are 'pausing spend' rather than redirecting. They're reducing their marketing budgets and pointing the finger at Facebook so no one looks too closely at the implications of their reduced ad spend.

To be fair to Verizon, they have not laid off a single person since March. The retrained 95% of their retail workers to be at home support agents and the rest are still working in their stores for issues that have to be solved in person.

So it makes sense that they would need to cut budget somewhere, since employees is not one of them.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#12

Post by anoncareer0212 »

forbiddenvoid wrote: post #6

Sounds like Verizon's Facebook advertising spend is losing value because of COVID-19, so they're using this a way to redirect focus away from the negative impact on their business. All of the companies doing this right now are 'pausing spend' rather than redirecting. They're reducing their marketing budgets and pointing the finger at Facebook so no one looks too closely at the implications of their reduced ad spend.

Fact-free assertions :/

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#13

Post by kypro »

We need to get corporate interests as far away from political speech as possible.

It's honestly a disgrace these companies are trying to boycott Facebook for not wanting to censor our speech.

We all know the phase "hate speech" is interchangeable with anything that's not deemed advertiser friendly to these corporations.

You think these companies want to advertise against a status update critical of the BLM movement? Of course not. If Facebook buckles to these demands they'll be boycotting Facebook to censor posts critical of political movements they don't like next. We need to stop acting as if billion dollar corporations have our best interests at heart.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#15

Post by thundergolfer »

0xDEADBEF wrote: post #9

Sigh, more politics intermingled with doing business. Just provide a service and leave it be.

Business is political. It’s only can appear apolitical if business activity is so in harmony with the political status-quo that political conflict and negotiation is almost wholly absent.

Facebook is obviously involved politically, and has been well before 2016. Hell, how many millions do you think they spend on political lobbying? Why do they fill so many of their high-up executive positions with ex-politicians?

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#16

Post by ve55 »

vvanders wrote: post #10
forbiddenvoid wrote: post #6

Sounds like Verizon's Facebook advertising spend is losing value because of COVID-19, so they're using this a way to redirect focus away from the negative impact on their business. All of the companies doing this right now are 'pausing spend' rather than redirecting. They're reducing their marketing budgets and pointing the finger at Facebook so no one looks too closely at the implications of their reduced ad spend.

Either way, if it puts pressure on FB to structure their business in a way that doesn't push hate at a micro targeted level isn't that a good thing?

It's hard to phrase this in a way that doesn't sound snarky, but I mean it sincerely: Would you rather they become more like Twitter instead? Promoting virality is promoting outrage content, full-stop.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#17

Post by lucasmullens »

ycombonator wrote: post #7
nawgszy wrote: post #4

So in this case, the enemy of my enemy is or is not my friend?

If Hillary would have won none of this would have been a problem.

What would Hillary have done that would have avoided this situation? This is a dispute between two private companies, and there's not a clear piece of legislation that would prevent this, especially one that would be approved by Congress.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#18

Post by forbiddenvoid »

jedberg wrote: post #11
forbiddenvoid wrote: post #6

Sounds like Verizon's Facebook advertising spend is losing value because of COVID-19, so they're using this a way to redirect focus away from the negative impact on their business. All of the companies doing this right now are 'pausing spend' rather than redirecting. They're reducing their marketing budgets and pointing the finger at Facebook so no one looks too closely at the implications of their reduced ad spend.

To be fair to Verizon, they have not laid off a single person since March. The retrained 95% of their retail workers to be at home support agents and the rest are still working in their stores for issues that have to be solved in person. So it makes sense that they would need to cut budget somewhere, since employees is not one of them.

I don't fault Verizon for cutting budget. It's absolutely the right thing to do. But if we weren't in the situation we're in they probably wouldn't be doing this.

The nuance between "we're going to stop doing business with Facebook because Facebook is bad" and "we have to cut budget from advertising and we chose to cut it from Facebook because Facebook is bad" is important.

It's convenient to do this now, but hard to believe that any of these companies would have done this at this kind of scale if they weren't backed into making cuts.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#19

Post by toomuchtodo »

ve55 wrote: post #16
vvanders wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either way, if it puts pressure on FB to structure their business in a way that doesn't push hate at a micro targeted level isn't that a good thing?

It's hard to phrase this in a way that doesn't sound snarky, but I mean it sincerely: Would you rather they become more like Twitter instead? Promoting virality is promoting outrage content, full-stop.

Could we prefer they no longer exist? Examples: there’s nothing an oil company can turn into that continues to sell oil in a non harmful manner. Altria tried to adopt vaping (still harmful) to move away from cigarettes (very harmful!).

Some businesses and their products should simply not exist due to the harm they cause. I apologize upfront if this doesn’t seem genuine and instead, unnecessarily controversial.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#20

Post by luckydata »

lucasmullens wrote: post #17
ycombonator wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Hillary would have won none of this would have been a problem.

What would Hillary have done that would have avoided this situation? This is a dispute between two private companies, and there's not a clear piece of legislation that would prevent this, especially one that would be approved by Congress.

Check again what started this dispute and you’ll have your answer.
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