- Remember when Facebook was fun?
- Remember when Facebook helped you reach your target audience?
- Remember when you advertised on Facebook and it actually resulted in sales?
- Remember when Facebook was not political?
Yes, 2010 was a great year. Fast forward to 2020.
Mark Zuckerberg came out in defense of hosting content that incites violence, promotes political lies and conspiracy theories and, to top it off, he said he would continue to do so. He has officially defined what Facebook is, what it stands for and WHAT ITS VALUES ARE.
Are Facebook’s Values compatible with CSR?
In a word, NO. CSR Values are an organization’s stated ‘rules of conduct’ they are going to hold themselves to. They are a company’s moral compass and guiding philosophy on how they are going to conduct business. It is inconceivable that any company would define their values to be bad, borderline illegal or immoral.
Facebook has taken a position of avoiding responsibility. This standard falls below the rock-bottom minimum for the corporate behavior of any CSR standard.
The “We are not the arbiters of truth” Excuse
This excuse is completely ridiculous. What exactly are the “Community Standards” every post are subject to if not the right to judge their content? Let there be no confusion about this, they give themselves the right to judge and be the arbiters of truth for every single post that is made on their platform. They choose witch ones to judge. They choose to leave posts that either 1) make them hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and 2) post that curry political favor to protect Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
The profit motive is obvious enough. Political organizations and anonymous (domestic and foreign) influencers pour hundreds of millions of dollar into the platform to spread lies and deceptions every month. As stated by the CEO, they can say whatever they want, whether it is true or not. Also it doesn’t matter if it incites violence, promotes racism or destroys the reputation of citizens.
The political motive is only slightly less obvious. Social media platforms are protected from lawsuits because of Section 230. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 is a piece of Internet legislation in the United States that provides immunity from liability for platforms that publish information provided by third-party users:
Section 230 – No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
This means anonymous people and foreign governments posting to a platform can liable, threaten, slander people at will and Facebook bears no responsibility, legally and apparently morally (from Zuckerberg’s recent statements).
Facebook is keen to keep this ‘get out of jail’ card in place and it is willing to do political favors in order to do this.
Should your Company cut ties with Facebook? Yes.
There is absolutely no way that any company that claims to conduct business using the principals defined in their CSR declarations (values, vision and objectives) can continue to interact with a company that promotes hate, racism, lies and deception. Remember, they do not even pretend not to do these things.
Would your company buy stolen goods? Probably not. Would you company pay a third-party to slander your competition? I am guessing again no. Would your company do business with a company that openly allows its customers to incite violence and endanger public health? If not, you should cut ties with Facebook.
Let’s also be real. Does Facebook actually benefit your business? Probably not much. Unless you are a small local company that conducts a large part of your business through the platform, the benefit of having a presence on Facebook is minimal. People can look you up here and you can offer some customer service through it, but advertising on the platform has become a complete waste of money.
I would not have said this 10 years ago. The ability to micro-target was truly revolutionary in its day, however unfortunately now, when you place an ad on Facebook, the majority of hits your ads will receive are from ‘fake accounts’. As an ad customer, you have always had to trust the stats that Facebook provides you on hits and engagements. Recently our company dug a little deeper into the ‘clicks’ that we were receiving (and paying for). In our small experiment, we had clicks from fake accounts in Moldova, Afghanistan, Liberia and Russia. We decided advertising on Facebook was a complete waste of our money.
How to delete your Company Page on Facebook (like we did)
If your company page is a Fan Page, you can delete it in 28 seconds! Facebook will keep it around for 2 weeks in case you change your mind.
Send us your videos of your company deleting Facebook
Feel free to send us your videos of your company deleting your Facebook page. We will post them to our twitter (yes, we will get to them next). Or mention us @caelusgreenroom on twitter and we will retweet.
