Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 356 posts

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#181

Post by bobthechef »

Fiduciary responsibility. The company would not boycott Facebook unless there was at least a business incentive in place. Meaning, even if there are moral concerns, they are entirely secondary to or constrained by business concerns. The opportunism isn't in this subordination, but in the PR that tries to present this as a purely moral decision.

(In any case, the concept and actual use of "hate speech" is dangerous. Laws regulating language that incites violence already exist, but "hate speech" is a phrase often unjustly used to silence people that those using the phrase don't agree with. The better response is to respond with better speech that addresses it or to ignore it.)

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#182

Post by inscionent »

Thorentis wrote: post #144

> Private company tells other private company which speech they should be censoring Welcome to the new era of information folks. You thought private companies were too powerful before, well, guess what? You've now given them the power to control almost all forms of communication. "But, but, private companies should be able to decide who they want on their platform! What about the free market?" Wake the hell up. Read…

This is the free market. Verizon is paying Facebook. If you want a say, you should consider paying for your social network.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#183

Post by JoshTriplett »

cwhiz wrote: post #140
crazygringo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate speech is widely viewed as a legitimate exception to free expression, along with other classic examples of things like yelling fire in a crowded movie theater. Not by every country to be sure, but by many democracies. You're portraying this as some kind of whim that changes with people's moods, but that's a complete, total, 100% straw man. There are decades of legislation and jurisprudence, particularly in Europ…

What is hate speech? Can you define it for me? Better yet, use legal definitions.

The great thing about not defining it in law is that anyone is free to use their own definition when deciding who they support, who they give money and patronage to, and who they host the content of.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#184

Post by partiallypro »

pvg wrote: post #177
partiallypro wrote: post #54

I really don't understand this protest at all. If they really care about this, why aren't they pulling from YouTube and Google? Which has very very bad comment sections? I'm not for big corporations calling for people to police speech. Patagonia boycotted Facebook, but they have 13 factories in China...a country with concentration camps for Muslims and political prisoners. A lot of corporate good will falls on deaf e…

Choosing how to spend your own money is hardly 'policing speech'. It sounds more like it's not that you don't understand it but you're set on framing it in a specific way. As you point out, this can lead to hearing loss.

I understand what is happening, and what they want. I don't understand why they want it, other than they've done market research to show such a stance could lead to increased sales or brand marketing. I mean, this protest alone has already brought them tremendous free press/advertising. They've crunched the numbers.

Also...they are calling on the company to police speech. So how can you say they are "hardly policing speech" when they are literally calling for another company to do that? They can do whatever they want with their money, but to pretend they aren't advocating the policing of speech on a platform is just nonsense.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#185

Post by root_axis »

The outrage in this thread doesn't make sense to me. This is how advertising works, it's a business decision based on business interests, Verizon doesn't care about any of this one way or another, they are simply taking a stance based on pressure from their customers. What so many of you flippantly dismiss as an outrage mob is a coalition of concerned citizens who believe Facebook is wrong for allowing dishonest political content to disseminate unchecked. It's fine to disagree, but just repeating "censorship" is not convincing, other values exist and compete with the human right to shit-post on social media.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#186

Post by np_tedious »

pvg wrote: post #177
partiallypro wrote: post #54

I really don't understand this protest at all. If they really care about this, why aren't they pulling from YouTube and Google? Which has very very bad comment sections? I'm not for big corporations calling for people to police speech. Patagonia boycotted Facebook, but they have 13 factories in China...a country with concentration camps for Muslims and political prisoners. A lot of corporate good will falls on deaf e…

Choosing how to spend your own money is hardly 'policing speech'. It sounds more like it's not that you don't understand it but you're set on framing it in a specific way. As you point out, this can lead to hearing loss.

The premise is that the advertisers are pulling out bc they are disappointed with Facebook's relative lack of policing speech

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#187

Post by [deleted] »

Thorentis wrote: post #144

> Private company tells other private company which speech they should be censoring Welcome to the new era of information folks. You thought private companies were too powerful before, well, guess what? You've now given them the power to control almost all forms of communication. "But, but, private companies should be able to decide who they want on their platform! What about the free market?" Wake the hell up. Read…

[deleted]

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#188

Post by jhowell »

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.

What if they are just , “... pausing our advertising until Facebook can create an acceptable solution that makes us comfortable”? because they don't feel Facebook has acted in a manner consistent with their perceived values?

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#189

Post by Reelin »

seppin wrote: post #74
cwhiz wrote: post #41

We want Facebook to censor speech on Facebook! But oh not all speech just some speech that we don’t like. Only we are allowed to define the type of speech we don’t like. And we reserve the right to change at any time. So, please just censor speech that we don’t like. On this day. At this hour. At this minute. And next minute we’ll tell you what to censor next.

Speech that leads to violence, how about starting with that?

> Speech that leads to violence, how about starting with that?

That's already illegal in most (all?) of the US. The precedent for that is Brandenburg v. Ohio; the legal term is "imminent lawless action". (Regarding Facebook, my understanding is that they will happily remove such speech. That's what the report button is for.)

Of course that doesn't provide for censoring politically incorrect or socially unacceptable views so naturally people get bent out of shape and proceed to use terms such as "violence" and "harm" in creative new ways.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#190

Post by cy_hauser »

bilbo0s wrote: post #124
bowmessage wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? It’s fine if you don’t derive value from their product, but clearly others do, and if they were to go under something else just as evil, if not more, would immediately take its place. Is it not more worthwhile to fix the issues with society that make Facebook unpleasant?

Why is it worthwhile to "fix" society's "unpleasant" aspects? And who, exactly, determines which aspects are "unpleasant"? Much better from my perspective to have multiple huge "big corporates" protest each other to the point of landing economic body blows. That's the tried and true "let the market solve the problem" solution. So everyone can vote with their dollars.

A large percent of the world has little to no money. They have no real choice except to accept free with all the consequences. Not using a service like facebook may not be realistic when the percentage of a group using it gets above a useful/necessary threshold.
Post reply on HN