Facebook is one, if not the most successful social media platform in the world, but recently a lot of big companies are boycotting their partnership with this titan due to some forms of hate speech that became pretty viral. Alongside Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, the two social media platforms manage to draw almost ninety percent of all social media traffic towards them, which is more than enough to tell you how important they are in the industry.
Everyone has a social media profile these days, whether it’s LinkedIn for more business-related things, or Facebook and Instagram just for fun, it’s quite rare to find someone who doesn’t have any of these. This fact is really important because it gives us at least some understanding of the power that these two platforms hold. In just a few seconds, they’re able to change the opinion of a few billion people simply by posting something that’s public to everyone.
Today we’ll talk about some of the recent drama that’s happening with Facebook, and we’ll get a bit more into why some very large companies are boycotting their partnership with this social media giant. If you’re eager to learn some more, you’re more than welcome to keep on reading until the end. Let’s take a look.
Why is Facebook so important for brands?
As we mentioned above, brands and social media platforms both benefit from each other, meaning that this is not an easy decision for neither of these two sides. However, some popular brands such as Adidas made it very loud and clear that they’ll pause all collaboration until Facebook finds a better way of censuring and regulating hate speech.
We’re all familiar with the current situation in the United States, and they had some huge issues with racism. Brands such as Adidas have always strived for the human union, peace, and solidarity, so they simply cannot continue their collaboration until some of these things are sorted out. Building a brand takes so many years, but it takes so little to destroy the entire reputation, so titans such as Adidas and Nike simply cannot risk being associated with all the hate-speech that’s cruising around on the world’s most popular social media platform.
Which brands stated that they’ll boycott?
You’re probably reading this and wondering which brands are the ones that will stop their collaboration with Facebook until things get sorted out, and we’re more than glad to answer that. Here are some of the brands that joined the #StopHateForProfit campaign. You’ll probably recognize many of these:
- Reebok (Clothing & Sports brand)
- Adidas (Clothing & Sports brand)
- Affirm (Financial Services Startup)
- Arc’teryx (Clothing brand)
- Nike (Clothing & Sports brand)
- Beam Suntory (A liquor company)
- Ben & Jerry’s (Ice cream making company)
- Best Buy (Titan in the trading industry)
- Birchbox (Makeup & Beauty)
- Blue Bottle Coffee (Coffee)
- Braze (Software company)
- Many other brands
Some of these brands, and many more, will take a huge loss because advertising on this social media platform is probably one of the best ways to reach an audience. Expect some underperforming from many smaller and medium-sized enterprises due to the current situation. It’s not easy to survive against all the competitors in the corporate world without advertising properly, so we cannot say that this isn’t an issue for the companies as well, as much as it is for Facebook. On top of all this, the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t making things any better. If currently one of your local financial investment firms is undergoing through some changes and their services are unavailable for you, at financebrokerage you can find a very useful review for Vlom.
How will this affect Facebook?
Facebook is currently going under a lot of pressure, and it gets even worse because some of the other platforms such as Twitter have already made a lot of effort when it comes to censuring speech categorized as “glorifying violence or racism”.
As you can see, tons of companies are stopping their collab with Facebook, so we expect the social media platform to experience a huge economic loss, which will hopefully be more than enough of a reason to take some steps towards censuring such content. Facebook will no doubt lose a lot of profit in the upcoming months due to the #StopHateForProfit campaign, which is catastrophic from a business point of view, but right from a moral aspect.
As much as we don’t support what this social media website does at the moment and how they handle things for such a huge leader in the industry, we believe that they’ll act with urgency and find a solution to the problem soon. When money is in question, they cannot allow such huge losses to take place.
Are brands in a loss because of this?
Many of you are probably concerned about the brands which you’re following or supporting financially, and to tell the truth, it’s a good time to be worried. As we mentioned above, currently Facebook and Instagram are the two world-leading platforms for social media, and losing your ability to advertise on those is truly a large hit from a marketing POV. However, if they continued their collaboration and slowly achieved a much-feared negative reputation in the world of business, they’d be at a much larger loss.
So, we think that this won’t be easy for businesses, especially not for the ones of smaller size, but it’s the right step towards maintaining a good reputation and surviving in the long-term.
How long will the boycott last?
How long will the campaign last and whether the boycott will end soon or not is something that we simply cannot answer, but we surely believe that everything will be sorted out soon? As we said above, Facebook is already endangered by the huge amounts of money they’re losing, so they’ll have to do something and do it very quickly. Since the entire point of this campaign is to transfer a message, not harm Facebook economically, we believe that things will get back to normal soon. The entire internet is currently speaking about this, so chances are very slim that the executives of this world-famous platform won’t do anything about it.
