Disney is reportedly pulling ads on Facebook as part of ongoing hate speech boycott
Facebook is a bad website that is responsible for a lot of bad things, and due to mounting pressure from users and organizations like the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League over the way it handles (or, you know, doesn’t handle) hate speech, it has been facing an ongoing advertiser boycott. Today, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal (via Deadline), the Walt Disney Company has apparently joined that boycott by “slashing” the amount of money it spends on Facebook ads. The company itself hasn’t commented on this and the WSJ story only spoke to anonymous sources, but apparently the ads being pulled were mostly about Disney+ and may have amounted to something like $210 million. This also apparently extends to Instagram (which Facebook owns) and Hulu (which Disney partially owns), with Hulu cutting off Instagram ads after having reportedly spent $16 million advertising on the platform from the middle of April to the end of June.
Companies like Starbucks, Verizon, Ford, and Unilever (the company behind every product ever) have also reduced or totally canceled Facebook ads, but WSJ says Disney was the top advertiser on Facebook for the first six months of the year—so this might have some kind of impact. Meanwhile, Facebook has said that it’s committed to doing more to prevent the spread of hate speech on its platform, saying in a statement that it has put “billions of dollars” toward banning racist organizations and putting systems in place that will automatically catch hate speech even before a human flags it.
Deadline also points out that Facebook makes around $70 billion from advertising every year and has “over eight million advertisers,” so even the departure of big fish like Disney and Starbucks might not be as huge as it seems.