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Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

reuters.com

191–200 of 356 posts

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#191
post #103

Increasingly, I just want a completely decentralized social networking toolchain, where people can subscribe to the moderation and filtration they like, and nothing can be universally censored.

But what happens when the moderation and filtration mechanisms are inevitably corrupted?

If it's fully decentralized why wouldn't the user change their selected mechanisms?

If all they have is voluntary subscriptions to others' feeds, in what manner can that be corrupted?

If they voluntarily chose to subscribe to a centralized third party as a data source or moderator how is that different from what we currently have? (And why wouldn't they just switch?)

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#192
post #103

Increasingly, I just want a completely decentralized social networking toolchain, where people can subscribe to the moderation and filtration they like, and nothing can be universally censored.

But what happens when the moderation and filtration mechanisms are inevitably corrupted?

In my vision, the tooling to perform moderation and filtration is independent from the data hose, so one can pick up and move to a different moderation regime when unsatisfied.

I don't think we're ever going to have harmony with one single arbiter at the center, especially when that arbiter also has a financial interest in the overall network.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#193

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…

I don't have a facebook, so I don't know how they are advertising these days? But I know that on YouTube your ads won't show on objectionable content. Is there a similar system on facebook? Or do your ads show against all content no matter how objectionable it is? If you can't control where your ads are shown, then this boycott doesn't really surprise me. By way of a contrived example, suppose there is content about…

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1926878614264962?id=1...

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#194
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fact-free assertions :/

Ad spending is down universally, that much is true. [1] And everyone in ads knows this. This also makes it very easy for execs to spin some PR in whatever direction they want. It would be hard to provide 'evidence' that of the cynical take that VZ is just using this as an excuse, but there's no doubt the calculus works. [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/coronavirus-advertisi...

HN used to have higher standards for discourse than "there in an effect, therefore any cause is plausible" - I believe it still does

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#195

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 poli…

I would never suggest that HN is being astro-turfed by FB, because even suggesting so will get your account banned. But, it would be neat to have a dataset of anonymized users/ip/votes to run analysis on.

Again, not suggesting this forum has been influenced by sock-puppets. I wouldn't dare.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#196
post #103

Increasingly, I just want a completely decentralized social networking toolchain, where people can subscribe to the moderation and filtration they like, and nothing can be universally censored.

It's not "completely decentralized" due to various realities, but federated and self hostable services such as Matrix, Mastodon, and PixelFed should mostly work for use with family and friends at this point.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#197
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most companies don’t want their advertising associated with anything that will give them bad press. We saw the same thing with YouTube and “demonetization”.

It’s not they are ethical, it just doesn’t make sense from a business standpoint.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#199

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.

[deleted]

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#200

> 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…

A private company is deciding that it doesn’t want its brand to be associated with certain subjects. What do you propose? A law saying that Verizon can’t choose where to spend its ad dollars?

You have the right to say what you want. You don’t have the right to get a platform to publish it. People were getting their voices heard nationwide before the internet existed. During the Civil Rights Movement, leaders went to churches.

We can see in the last presidential election how little Trump spent on traditional media to get his voice out there.

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