Sigh, more politics intermingled with doing business. Just provide a service and leave it be.
I support your position of outlawing lobbyists, overturning Citizens United and instituting a blanket ban on political contributions by corporations.
Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
51–60 of 356 posts
Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
#52While I do believe the Facebook boycott is real, Verizon has a fairly large advertising/media business of their own and so is competitor to Facebook. Not mentioning this as part of reporting isn't great journalism.
Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
#53Many 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.
Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
#54I 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 ears for me, especially when they have been so silent on issues in China/Hong Kong/Taiwan. Money talks, if this weren't a profitable thing to do, they wouldn't do it.
Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
#55We 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.
[deleted]
Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
#56We 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.
the whole point of a democracy is to give the people what the want
Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
#57I am very nervous that the main US political outcomes of 2020 will be a reduction in free speech and expansion of executive powers.
That happens basically every election. We've been slipping in free speech freedoms in various indexes for 20 years now, and that has been regardless of who is in office.
Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly? I think all political advertising shouldn't be allowed, it gives those with a disproportionate amount of capital a lever of influence that runs counter to the democratic process. If you want to push an issue you should have to organize people who believe in your cause and have them involved. There's been plenty of examples of microtargeting's influence that makes me think it has no place in the political di…
How would you organize people to your cause without doing anything that would be considered 'advertising'? Unless you narrowly define advertising in a way that is easily worked around..
Same way we can have an open discussion on this lovely site we call HN.
While I'm not going to claim to know every definition of advertising, generally if money changes hands for priority over organic traffic that fits the bill pretty well for me. Doubly so if you're able to target specific categories and demographics. I think what makes microtargeting so bad in particular is that you can do things that would be negative to the broader public but narrow the scope so you have multiple sides of a campaign that doesn't let the public have a reasonable view of that campaign/issue as a whole.
Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
#59We 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.
This situation appears to me to be corporations freely associating and/or choosing to do business, or not to do business, with other corporations. No government coercion involved in either forcing or blocking this behavior.
In other words, the libertarian ideal of the future.
I don't see the problem. The fact that this behavior isn't universally celebrated is an example of why libertarianism fails in the real world. It doesn't even get the trivial cases.
edit: a word
Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
The timing is quite suspicious.
I am as cynical about the behavior of large corporations as anyone. But you can never really know anybody's motivations, only guess them from their actions. Verizon could be doing it because of ad budgeting reasons. Verizon could be doing it because of public pressure. Most likely, both benefits go into their cost-benefit analysis.
I just searched for Verizon on Google, and there was a Verizon ad, so they're still spending on digital marketing elsewhere. That Google ad is not even likely to be profitable considering Verizon owns all the organic links in the first page of results except for the Wikipedia result ranked fourth.
If they were cutting advertising spend due to the economy, it would be rational to cut unprofitable spend first. I'm inclined to take them at their word for why they cut Facebook spend.