Some Advertisers Returning To Facebook After Boycott Over Hateful Content

Facebook Vice President Nicola Mendelsohn said Wednesday that some advertisers that boycotted the social media platform for not adequately combating hate speech have since returned.

Mendelsohn did not name the advertisers but told Bloomberg News the announcement comes after increased efforts to manage content, including the ability to remove “about 95%” of hate speech that reviewers catch before it’s reported.

“A lot of the advertisers have come back, and they’ve come back because they can see the efforts that we’ve been making,” Mendelsohn said.

Some of the world’s top brands and products like General Motors, Hershey’s, and Lego cut spending with Facebook this year. A movement, with the hashtag StopHateForProfit, organized the boycott by pushing companies to stop advertising on Facebook due to perceived weak content-regulation practices.

For brands like Adidas, which recently returned to advertising on Facebook, there is the implication that Facebook has turned a corner on past practices.

“We will continue to expect greater transparency and action from all of our partners,” a spokesperson for Adidas said in August.

For Facebook, any defections from notable advertisers could mean a serious financial setback, with the top 100 advertisers contributing 16% of the platform’s $18.7 billion revenue in the second quarter this year, the New York Times reported.

Meanwhile, there may still be lingering damage to Facebook’s reputation from boycotting advertisers.

“What could really hurt Facebook is the long-term effect of its perceived reputation and the association with being viewed as a publisher of ‘hate speech’ and other inappropriate content,” Stephen Hahn-Griffiths, an executive at data insights company RepTrak, wrote in a July post.