Advertisers keep agreeing to pull advertising from Facebook and Instagram.
Unilever is the latest company to join a boycott dubbed “Stop Hate for Profit,” started a week ago by groups including Color of Change, the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League over Facebook’s refusal to tamp down racist and hate speech on its platforms, including posts by President Trump.
Facebook’s stock on Friday dropped 7.6 percent to $217 a share on Friday. Twitter’s dropped 7.5 percent to $29 a share.How much Unilever, the maker of hundreds of products from Dove soap to Breyer’s ice cream, spends on Twitter for ads could not be immediately ascertained. But at its current rate of spend on Facebook, the company will be missing out on roughly $9 million in ad revenue for the rest of this year.
A Facebook spokeswoman clarified that Unilever’s decision to pull ads is only applicable to Facebook and Instagram in the U.S., not international markets. Both platforms are available in nearly every country in the world. She added that Facebook invests “billions of dollars each year to keep our community safe and [we] continuously work with outside experts to review and update our policies.”
On Thursday, Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s vice president of global business, provided a more tepid comment through a spokeswoman: “We respect any brand’s decision, and remain focused on the important work of removing hate speech and providing critical voting information.”This is the second move Unilever has made in recent days seemingly in direct response to the wave of protests in the U.S.
In terms of digital platforms, that essentially leaves Google, which already accounts for more than 30 percent of the digital ad market globally, then Snapchat and TikTok. Both of those social platforms have a much smaller user base than Facebook and Instagram, with 2.6 billion and one billion monthly active users, respectively. Snap has about 360 million monthly active users and fast-growing TikTok has about 500 million.
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