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Boycott or Not, Facebook Remains Effective
August 1, 2020
As discussed in our last
POV, a handful of brands decided to take part in the
“Stop Hate For Profit Campaign” - a boycott against advertising on Facebook through the month of July called for by a number of civil right activist groups including the Anti Defamation League, Color of Change, and Sleeping Giants. What started as a handful then has grown into much more. The call to arms gained traction in June, with brands including Coca-Cola, Unilever, Ford, Best Buy, Verizon, Starbucks, Lego, Ben and Jerry's and Diageo temporarily pulling their ad spending from the social network. Today, over 1,000 companies have taken part in the campaign. While a number of brands have decided to re-activate on Facebook in August, seeing progress in the work Facebook is making, a handful of brands have announced they will stay dark on the platforms for the remainder of the year.
Facebook is one of - if not the most - efficient and effective advertising platforms on the planet. It is a destination that consumers will continue to frequent and a place for marketers to reach their customers. Facebook knows it must address these issues and throughout the month of July, has worked to make strides to fight online hate. The company has taken a variety of steps to improve across critical areas such as hate speech, voter suppression, and misinformation:
- Employed the latest technologies like advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to proactively find nearly 90% of the hate speech content removed from Facebook before anyone even reports it.
- Removed 3 million pieces of hate speech each month, or more than 4,000 per hour.
- Tripled the people working on safety and security to more than 35,000.
- Published regular Community Standards Enforcement Reports to share our progress and demonstrate our continued commitment to making Facebook and Instagram safe.
- Gone beyond existing hate speech protections to ban ads that are divisive, inflammatory or engage in fear mongering
- At the beginning of July less than a third of consumers were aware of the boycott.
- SocialCode observed a slight decrease in CPM and a slight increase in cost per acquisition when comparing June 2020 to July 2020 however both CPM and CPA were down when comparing July 2019 to July 2020.
- In the last week or so performance has actually increased above what we saw in June for brands who have stayed live on the platform.
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