Facebook Now Left Big Advertisers' Big Brands

CEO Facebook Mark Zuckerberg (Instagram @markzuckerberg)

JAKARTA - Many big brands such as Unilever, Coca-cola and Starbuck have stopped their advertising business on Facebook. This boycott was carried out because Mark Zuckerberg was deemed unsuccessful in reducing the number of hoaxes and hate speech on his platform.

The boycott stems from an open letter from the non-profit organization the anti-Defamation League, NAACP, which is campaigning for the #StopHateforProfit movement, last June 17. In this action, asking big companies to stop and stop advertising on the Facebook and Instagram platforms.

This is because Facebook does not label hate speech and hoax content on their platform. Of course, this is different from what Twitter does by labeling or providing a fact-check for every upload to social media.

"Every day, we see advertisements from companies placed next to hateful content, occupying the same space as extremist recruitment groups and dangerous disinformation campaigns," said ADL CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt who initiated the movement, Monday, June 29.

The big brands are Unilever, Coca-Cola, Verizon, Patagonia, REI, Lending Club, and The North Face. Apart from Unilever, there are also FMCG companies that have stopped advertising on Facebook such as Procter & Gamble (P&G), Dove, Ben & Jerry's, and Hellmann, at least for the rest of 2020.

Coca Cola's Statement to Stop Advertising on Facebook (Coca-Cola Company)

This action was also followed, a number of other companies that also advertise on Facebook such as Rakuten, Viber, Levi's, Dockers, Jansport, Honda, and the big chocolate brand Hershey's who also took a similar step. We don't know how long the wave of removing ads on Facebook by these brands will stop.

According to a Bloomberg report, as a result of this advertising stop action, Facebook shares plunged 8.3 percent and was corrected to 56 billion US dollars. The number of companies that stopped advertising on Facebook also made Mark Zuckerberg's wealth decrease drastically by 7.21 billion US dollars or around Rp.103.5 trillion in the last 24 hours.

This makes Zuckerberg have to be willing to drop to fourth position in the list of the richest people in the world, under Louis Vuitton boss Bernard Arnault, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

Facebook Boss Response

Apart from the many boycotts, Facebook immediately made a number of improvements to its platform. One of them is Mark Zuckerberg announced that he will label all posts related to the US election with a link that encourages users to view the election information center.

In addition, Facebook will also expand the definition of prohibited hate speech and add a clause that no ads will be displayed in posts labeled as dangerous by Facebook.

"Often, seeing speeches from politicians is in the public interest, and in the same way that news outlets will report what politicians are saying, we think the average person should be able to see it for themselves on our platform," Zuckerberg said of the post on his personal Facebook page.

"We will immediately start labeling some of the content we have left behind as newsworthy, so people can know when this happened," he added.