Major brands like Puma, Coca-Cola and Ford are pulling their ads from Facebook and other social media sites for the month of July as a part of a campaign weakening advertising-dependent sites.
Over 400 firms have joined the #StopHateForProfit campaign by suspending ads on Facebook and Instagram for the month of July to protest hate speech on the internet.
Others have gone further and halted advertising on all social media leaving incontestable damage to many platforms dependent on advertising, something that governments have been unable to do.
However, the ultimate impact of the campaign remains uncertain.
Facebook is often criticised for its timid approach to controlling content, but amid the campaign the platform has made multiple uncharacteristic announcements.
Including banning the far-right movement "Boogaloo", promising to highlight sourced information and reinforce its moderation.
Economist and professor at Panthéon-Assas University, Laurent Bezoni said the campaign has finally shone a spotlight on social media's poor effort to moderate the most dangerous content on their platforms.
"Until now social media have managed to surf the wave of debate"
"But this is hitting them in the wallet," said Mr Benzoni, who is also a founder of the Tera consultancy.
Mr Bezoni said he is uncertain how social media platforms will find a solution that reassures advertisers while they maintain they are not media, and thus are not responsible for moderating content.
Hundreds of companies are boycotting advertising on Facebook as a part of the #StopHateforProfit campaign. Source: Press Association
But Daniel Salmon, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, said he doesn't expect a "tangible financial impact at this state".
That is because Facebook has a huge number of small and medium-sized businesses who place ads on its platform, around eight million in total.
Difficult to quit
According to calculations by the Pathmatics firm that tracks digital marketing and advertising, the top-spending 100 brands on Facebook accounted for only six per cent of its $70 billion revenue.
"It is really difficult for smaller companies to quit Facebook," said eMarketer junior analyst Nina Goetzen in a recent podcast.
The coronavirus pandemic has made quitting Facebook even harder as many small to medium-sized businesses have been forced to go completely digital with their advertising, she added.
Facebook has already capitalised on the crisis, unveiling in May its "Facebook Shops", an easy-to-use virtual shop template to allow businesses to set up on Facebook and Instagram.
With such online retail presence on the platforms, firms have an even stronger incentive to advertise there, and leaving becomes more difficult.
Debra Aho Williamson, a principal analyst at eMarketer, believes that this mobilisation is different than the scandal that followed revelations that Facebook allowed to scrape personal information from its users.
She emphasised that many of the advertisers which have joined the boycott "are ones that have a history of taking stances on social justice issues."
But she believes the tipping point will likely be whether huge firms such as Proctor & Gamble and Amazon join the movement.
'Break them up'
Will such giants really swear off the possibility of directly tailoring advertising to clients that Facebook and other social media platforms offer thanks the copious amounts of personal data they collect on their users?
Social media "built their business models on targeted advertising" using personal information gleaned from users, said Professor Olivier Bomsel at the University Mines Paris Tech.
Social media platforms "have an incentive to maximise their audience by creating sensationalist stories, exacerbating differences in opinion, conflicts of values," he added.
Nick Clegg, Facebook's top lobbyist, denied in a recent interview on Bloomberg TV that the platform pursues such a strategy.
Coca-Cola is one of the biggest brands out of the 400 that are boycotting advertising on Facebook. Source: Getty
"We do not profit from hate, we have no incentive to have hate on our platform, we don't like it,"
Our job is to minimise it as much as we can minimise it, but I don't want to pretend we can eliminate it all together," he added.
Even if the campaign against Facebook does achieve results, over the long term the issue of control over social media platforms remains political.
"Because advertisers bankrolled these platforms, we have a moral duty to pioneer alternative solutions," said Joy Howard, chief marketing officer at Dashlane, a password and personal information manager.
"While we can experiment with alternatives as a business, only our democratically elected institutions can effect lasting change.
"The only true lasting change, the one that both society and capitalism need, is to break them up," she said.
