What has the Facebook ad boycott actually achieved?

The #StopHateForProfit campaign, organized by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) in the USA, managed to persuade a lot of very large and influential corporations (including Disney, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, McDonalds, Unilever, and over 1,000 others) to withold their advertising from Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram for the month of July in order to pressure the social media giant to do something about its lax policies on hate, bigotry, racism, anti-Semitism and violence. Several Canadian companies also signed on to the campaign, including all five big banks, Lululemon, Mountain Equipment Coop and others.

Most of these companies have now re-started their Facebook ads and have returned to business as usual, including the Canadian banks. Unilever and Clorox committed from the start to boycotting to the end of the year, and Coca-Cola, Smuckers, Mars, Diageo, HP, CVS Health, Verizon and others have said they will continue to withold their advertising. In Canada, MEC and Moosehead Breweries have vowed to continue the campaign. 

But was all this just a cynical exercise in public relations that cost the companies very little, and that had very little effect on Facebook, which made nearly $5.2 billion in profits on advertising last quarter, up 98% from a year earlier? Financial analysts suggests that the concrete impact of the boycott will be "minimal", amounting to maybe $100 million (yes, that's "minimal" to Facebook).

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg certainly did not seem particularly put out by the campaign, quipping that the advertisers "will be back on the platform soon enough". But the public exposure of the campaign was enough for him to bring in some specific changes: the hiring of a "civil rights executive", the establishment of a team to study algorithm bias, the release of the results of a civil rights audit, the removal of content from hateful movements and problematic groups, and the conducting of an independent audit of hate content.

This all sounds quite impressive (although ADL Director and CEO Jonathan Greenblatt insists that the platform remains a "cesspool" of bigotry). Does this mean that the campaign was a success, though? Campaign organizers say that it "exceeded expectations", but that they are dissatisfied with Facebook's reponse, and have vowed to continue the campaign, albeit with a reduced roster of participants. Greenblatt says he expects to see "the movement get bigger and broader", but I think he may be overly optimistic (or just talking up a good game).

I know it is a tall order for a platform of the size and breadth of Facebook to police every post from every subscriber. It's tough to even identify hateful or deliberately misleading content, and to know just how gullible the general public is, and how susceptible they are to falsehoods and conspiracy theories. But, as Spiderman knew, with great power comes great responsibility, and the jury is still out on whether Facebook has done even the bare minimum to counteract the huge negative influence it has had for years on the more suggestible parts of its user base.