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Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

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Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#251

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…

The irony, of course, is that FB bans users left and right for the most mundane things. I follow blog of a poet who stopped publishing on Facebook because his poems get suspended all the time when they mention any issues.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#252

> 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…

It's extremely frustrating being someone left leaning that believes in the principals of free speech. It seems like all of the alternatives to the censored platforms, are naturally majority populated by the right. This polarizing effect squeezes out any productive centrist discussion or debate.

I second you on that frustration. You literally get shut out of discussion if you don't agree with every single popular policy.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#253
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the clarification. Now I remember reading something about an "antifa" flag, that seemed unconclusive... please, remember I'm a foreigner so my judgement may lack some insights you have. Actually all this seems absurd. Trump is a politician, actually a public officer, so censoring his speech is a alien concept to me. In my country certain politicians IMHO deserve jail for the outrageous nonsense they say…

>Now I remember reading something about an "antifa" flag, that seemed unconclusive... You're probably thinking of this case recently where Trump ran ads on Facebook which called out antifa and used the same symbol for them that the Nazis used for leftist political prisoners sent to concentration camps. The ads even had other Nazi dogwhistles included too. Facebook took down those ads. https://www.motherjones.com/2020…

I have no sympathy for the man and, trust me, I'm not playing dumb. I'm genuinely unable to see the logic in all this.

In a majority system you win by seducing the centrist vote. Why would anybody think it's a good idea to be associated with nazis? Or for that matter, dissolving the police, so his adversaries are trying to outdo him with similar egregious proposals.

What does Biden say about the lootings and the defunding? I can understand that extremist groups somehow justify the violence, but not a presidential candidate or his party. Verizon seems to be a phone company or gigantic ISP. Why does that kind of company takes sides in this fight?

What I find funniest is that over here even media in the opposite end of political spectrum complain when the government leaves them out of election adds.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#254
post #189
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

You obviously don't follow the President on Twitter, or have any idea of the scope of "revolutionary" private groups on Facebook.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#255
post #163
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Literally anything can lead to violence. It’s just a matter of interpretation. How about stopping with the censorship and fighting with the violence itself?

> Literally anything can lead to violence.

Literally anything and lead to anything, that's not an argument it's a distraction.

> How about stopping with the censorship

For the 1,000,000th time, private company cleaning up garbage content its "censorship". Only governments engage in censorship. Every private business has the ability to clean up their space without needed to ask permission.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#256

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 don't think people are asking for a FB boycott over "dishonesty", despite the way it is being framed. You literally have organisations like Sleeping Giants whose mission is to convince sponsors to dump sites that host conservative content. The current Facebook boycott is Stop Hate For Profit and is focused around hate speech (using the definition of hate speech as defined by the left). I lean quite heavily left, I'…

Voting for Trump would be a big mistake for many reasons. First, he's a terrible prez. But second, if Biden the "compromise candidate" loses, that empowers voices on the left who say "See? We need a radical like Bernie to fire people up!"

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#257

Many of the comments in this thread do not understand the concept of free speech from a legal perspective. Free speech does not mean that you have the right to say or distribute whatever you want on whatever platform, owned by a private corporation you want. on a side note - these are super dog whistle comments, and I'm surprised the mods are ok with them.

Likewise, citizens are free to criticize the actions of private corporations - whether they are criticizing Verizon or Facebook.

Say an environmentalist criticizes the practices of an oil company, and the overwhelming majority of rebuttals consist of saying that the oil company is acting perfectly legally and within its prerogatives. That would be a straw-man misdirection - no one is arguing that point.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#258
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it is giving Trump too much credit - the actual blame likely lies with the team running his campaign. All the same, it seems strangely coincidental that he keeps on stumbling into racist material and symbolism. I mean yeah, it was just a coincidence he restarted his rallies on Juneteenth in Tulsa, OK, that he then moved under pressure/outcry. Also a coincidence he used a quote from a racist police chief, and…

> used a nazi triangle If anyone doubts that this was an intentional dog whistle to white supremacists: the first sentence of the ad with the nazi triangle had 14 words[1]. His campaign ran 88 [2] on the facebook pages for Trump, Pence, and Team Trump. These are very well-known references used by white supremacists/neo-nazis they often use as dog whistles. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words [2] https://…

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Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#259

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.

If a marketing department is just told to reduce spend by 90% they will still be running some of their highest-ROI campaigns on Google and Facebook. Completely pausing Facebook means it's about something more than just budget cuts, because even with a reduced budget marketers always want to have at least a small presence on Google and Facebook since the ROIs are so high for the best campaigns.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#260
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the 2019 YT boycott was driven by the fact that YT kept showing ads next to content where pedophiles were commenting.[1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/technology/youtube-pedoph...

It was caused by insufficient brand safety levers for advertisers on YT. I was providing an example where advertisers paused spend to show the importance of their beliefs.

Why is it that advertisers did not care previously and for so long? The status quo for a decade was that all parties - consumers, YouTubers, advertisers, and YouTube itself did not care much about the minority of ad placements that happened to be next to niche political, mature, or sexual orientation subject matter.

Was it the uptick in activists such as Media Matters and Vox conducting name-and-shame campaigns, contacting brands with screenshots and threatening publication? Once a campaign like that picks up media cycles (like the FB one at the moment) it seems that brands follow en masse only then, and not a moment earlier.

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