29 Jan 2025 Search

Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat covers How Meta Turned Its Back on Human Rights for Tech Policy Press. Zuckerberg announced that his company will no longer work to detect abuses of its platforms other than high-severity violations of content policy, such as those involving illicit drugs, terrorism, and child sexual exploitation. The clear implication is that the company will no longer strive to police its platform against other harmful content, including hate speech and targeted harassment.

Sounds like a brand-unsafe environment. So is another rush of advertiser boycott stories coming? Not this time. Lara O’Reilly reports that brand safety has recently become a political hot potato and been a flash point for some influential, right-leaning figures. In uncertain times, marketing decision-makers are keeping a low profile. Most companies aren’t really set up to take on the open-ended security risk of coming out against hate speech by users with friends in high places. According to the Fraternal Order of Police, the January 6 pardons send a dangerous message, and that message is being heard in marketing departments. The CMOs who boycotted last time are fully aware that stochastic terrorism is a thing, and that rage stories about companies spread quickly in Facebook groups and other extremist media. If an executive makes the news for pulling ads from Meta, they would be putting employees at risk from lone, deniable attacks. So instead of announcing a high-profile boycott, marketers are more likely to follow the example of Federal employees and do the right thing, by the book, and quietly.

Fortunately, big advertisers got some lower-stakes practice with the X (former Twitter) situation. Instead of either (1) staying on there and putting the brand at risk of being associated with material copied out of Henry Ford’s old newspaper or (2) risking getting snarled up in a lawsuit for pulling the X ads entirely, brands got the best of both by cutting way back on the actual money without dropping X entirely or saying much one way or the other.

And it’s possible for advertisers to reduce support for Meta without making a stink or drawing fire. Fortunately, Meta ads are hella expensive, and results can be unrealistic and unsustainable. Like all the Big Tech companies these days, Meta is coping with a slowdown in innovation by tweaking the ad rules to capture more revenue from existing services. As Jakob Nielsen pointed out back in 2006, in Search Engines as Leeches on the Web, ad platforms can even capture the value created by others. A marketer doesn’t have to shout ¡No Pasarán! or anything—just sharpen your best math pencil, quietly go through the numbers, spot something that looks low-ROAS or fraudulent in the Meta column, tweak the budget, repeat. If users can dial down Meta, so can marketers. (Update: Richard Kirk writes, Brands could be spending three times too much on social. You read that right. Read the math, do the math.) And if Meta comes out with something new and risky like the adfraud in the browser thing, Privacy-Preserving Attribution, it’s easy to use the fraud problem as the reason not to do it—you don’t have to stand up and talk politics at work.

From the user side

It’s not that hard to take privacy measures that result in less money for Big Tech. Even if you can’t quit Meta entirely, some basic tools and settings can make an impact, especially if you use both a laptop and a phone, not just a phone. With a few minutes of work, an individual in the USA can, in effect, fine the surveillance business about $50/month.

My list of effective privacy tips is prioritized by how much I think they’ll cost the surveillance business per minute spent. A privacy tips list for people who don’t like doing privacy tips but also don’t like creepy oligarchs. (As they say in the clickbait business, number 9 will shock you: if you get your web browser info from TV and social media, you probably won’t guess which browsers have built-in surveillance and/or fraud features.) That page also has links to more intensive privacy advice for those who want to get into it.