Boycott against racism: "Facebook does an economic calculation"

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In the past week, nearly 200 brands have stopped advertising on Facebook and Instagram, in the name of the fight against racism. Interview with François Laurent, co-president of Adetem, National Marketing Association.

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The anti-racism movement has grown since the brutal death of George Floyd , an African-American asphyxiated during a police check in Minneapolis, in the United States. Anger is directed, inter alia, against social networks, perceived as too lax towards racist messages and incitement to hatred and violence. Nearly 200 brands, such as Starbucks, Ford, Coca-Cola, Levis, Hewlett-Packard, Unilever, Adidas and Puma have decided for a week to stop their advertising campaigns on Facebook in the name of the fight against racism.

Result: Friday, June 26, the title of the platform lost 50 billion market capitalization in a single day. It rebounded by 10 billion Monday, its founder Mark Zuckerberg having promised, once again, to tighten his policy of moderation. But  these promises and these stock market jolts are not going to profoundly change the situation, according to François Laurent, co-president of Adetem, National Association of Marketing.

RFI: Facebook represents 2.6 billion active users each month. It would also be the most visited site in the world after Google and YouTube. Does the decision of these companies risk putting him on the straw?

François Laurent: No, because Facebook doesn't take big risks. But first, you have to understand that for Facebook, what matters is to sell advertising. And for that, you need traffic. However, false information, a rumor, everything that revolves around racism circulates six times more than true information. The more “crap” and “rubbish” there is on Facebook, the more the traffic increases and therefore the more the advertising sells. These are extreme terms, but there is no other way to characterize the call to racial hatred. It's filthy. This is what made Hitler's heyday in the 1930s. We are in something extremely serious and morally abject.

When I say that Facebook doesn't take big risks, I don't mean that Facebook is right. I think that Mark Zuckerberg is surfing on the filth. It is serious from an ethical point of view. It is simply an economic calculation that he does. It will ensure that there are not too many advertisers who leave it, but also not to reduce its traffic too much to be able to sell advertising. And brands are being tricked.

An example: after the American election and the coming to power of Donald Trump, who is also one of those who launched hate calls, there were racist messages. Zuckerberg then decided to regulate things. What did he do ? It reduced the share of voice of the traditional media in the “timeline” (the display wall) of Internet users, instead of favoring the media to detect false information. It is absurd. So I think Zuckerberg is both very careful and very dangerous, who will ride the wave from time to time making decisions that will seem moral, knowing full well that, anyway it's not Facebook that brings it to life, but many other things.

Why are hundreds of brands now pressuring Facebook to cut their advertising budgets ? You said that they were tricked ...

I think that there is a good part of sincerity for certain companies, but for others, it is the means to make a little publicity on the back of Facebook. Overall, it is purely cyclical. You should know that at the beginning of Facebook, brands paid to make "friends" on Facebook. It was then a world of teddy bears. Facebook created spaces for brands and they paid dearly for having friends.

Once they were installed, Facebook told them that it no longer wanted to overload Internet users with advertisements. So only part of the brand communication landed on the wall of their "friends". To overcome this problem, Facebook told them: "If you advertise, I will make your friends see what you say on your Facebook pages". It was a second punishment. After paying to have friends, you had to pay even more for friends to see what brands were saying.

And third punishment, a study showed that videos posted on Facebook were much less effective than videos posted elsewhere. The problem is that everyone wanted to be on Facebook and whoever didn't want to be seen as cheesy. This created a whole set of traffic and the more brands there were on Facebook, the more the platform turned off what people could see. The only solution for brands was to pay more and more.

So are brands ultimately better off leaving the Facebook ship ?

Yes, because they are ripped off, but who will take the risk of leaving first? This is the big question. Hopefully, after the crisis, brands will stop wanting to sell anything to as many people as possible and will adopt ethical and responsible marketing, to sell better and not sell more. If brands take this ethical turn, there, social networks will have to worry. 

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