Facebook is evil. So what?

Photo by Alex Haney on Unsplash.

Over the last several days a number of brands – including Patagonia, REI, Ben and Jerry’s, the North Face, and Upwork – have announced they will boycott Facebook over the platform’s support of hate speech.

Is this a good idea – and should your brand join the boycott?

We’ll answer those questions soon; first, let’s lay some groundwork, and dump on Facebook for a while.

Facebook is evil.

There’s no question that Facebook is long overdue for a boycott. It’s the Draco Malfoy of social-media platforms – the smarmy, too-smart jerk totally deserving of a paste upside the snoot. And it’s evil besides. 

By “evil,” we don’t mean a smidge evil; Facebook is totally and completely evil. Its disingenuousness is only matched by the amorality of a business whose only core value is to get more people to spend more time with it through whatever means necessary.

There are small red beetles attacking the lilies in my wife’s garden, and their sole purpose in life is to eat lily leaves so they can propagate more red beetles to eat more lily leaves.

Facebook is like that, only with Nazi propaganda and ads for Chinese guitars. And, yeah, cute pictures of my nephews.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.

Facebook is a mass medium.

The thing that probably rankles me most about Facebook is its claim that it’s not a mass medium but a disinterested conduit, a channel that gifts the power of mass speech to entities other than itself.

Oh, come on. That’s like The New York Times claiming to be a supplier of newsprint to the masses and gee, we have no idea how those words got all over the pages.

Call it a platform or whatever modern term you want, but in truth Facebook is more like a newspaper than just about any newspaper short of the Times.

And I’ll go one step further: Facebook is a Sunday paper, with all the sections – Facebook News, Facebook Ads, Facebook Marketplace, space devoted to weddings and graduations and local sports, the funnies, and even a glossy photo supplement called Instagram.

It’s no secret that Facebook wants to have it both ways, to be the Sunday Dystopian Times – especially on the advertising side, where it touts its ability to deliver ads to the whole world or to whatever subset of the world that you choose – without any of the responsibilities.

It’s the shirking of the responsibilities that really distinguishes Facebook from all its fellow half-truth dealers throughout history.

As a journalist and a graduate of the George Santayana School of Marketing (“where those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it”), I can tell you there have been other media that have knowingly spread hateful half-truths. The Chicago Tribune of the 1930s (and its radio station, WGN) spewed reactionary vitriol. Henry Luce’s Time-Life empire hawked oligarchy. 

However, even these outlets at their worst had gatekeepers, editors and censors, and they never claimed to not be what they were. The Trib proudly called itself a newspaper (and the world’s greatest, at that); Time was “the weekly newsmagazine.”

Facebook, on the other hand, is … Facebook. Or, as I like to think of it, Randall Boggs, the villainous chameleon monster from Monsters, Inc. for whom the end always justifies the means.

Photo by Barefoot Communications on Unsplash.

Should you boycott?

Okay; we’ve established beyond reasonable doubt that Facebook is evil. Now, about the boycott.

There’s less to it than meets the eye. REI and Patagonia and the rest are not leaving Facebook for good; they’re simply staying away from the platform for a month.

As we used to say on the playground, big whoop. 

For outdoor brands, Facebook runs a distant second to Instagram as the platform of choice anyway, so giving up your No. 2 for a month is about as tough as giving up oysters for Lent, which you never eat anyway because you’re allergic.

In that respect, the boycott is much less actual sacrifice for a cause than it is a PR ploy to draw attention to the fact that Facebook supports hate speech.

Hey, PR ploys are legit. But in reality it’s just a love tap to Facebook’s cheek than any sort of body blow, and I expect it’ll have roughly the same effect.

So again I ask: should your brand be in?

I know where my brand sits on the question, and it’s not exactly where you might think.

I started my personal boycott of Facebook several years ago over its whoring of my data, and while I’ve had to keep my account alive to administer my clients’ accounts, I spend less than 15 minutes a week on the platform for personal purposes.

At the same time, I’m coming off a semester where I taught several social-media marketing classes that included Facebook marketing as part of the curriculum.

In those classes, I acknowledge my biases and then set them aside as I discuss with my students how to use Facebook to deliver brand messages in a targeted, cost-effective manner.

So sleeping with the enemy? Yeah, we’re totally spooning.

However, what I recommend my students do with Facebook is what I recommend to you. Dive deep into the platform. Understand how it sucks people in. Come to terms with its essential amorality. Analyze how it makes money. Study what it does with user data. 

Know everything you can about Facebook, and then ask yourself: Is this where I want my brand to be?

If you decide that it’s not, you’re faced with another challenge: Where to market your brand in such a way that its mission and values aren’t compromised.

For me, that answer always comes back to your own website.

Your website should be the Taj Mahal and the Smithsonian Institution of your brand. Everything you want your customers (and yes, your competitors) to know about your brand should be right there for them to grab and consume and understand.

Your website should be where your customers’ experience begins. It should be informative for the uninitiated, compelling for those seeking entertainment, detailed for those looking for detail, frictionless for the skimmers, and effortless for those looking to buy.

If your website is only a fraction of that, and you’re on Facebook and considering a boycott or just troubled by the platform, here’s what I’d do: 

• Stop any spending on Facebook, and donate at least that amount to one of these 137 organizations fighting for racial equality. 

• Put the resources you were expending on Facebook into making your website incredible and treating your customers better – not because you want them to go on Facebook in your stead and say how awesome you are (which they may do anyway) but because it’s the right thing to do.

• See what happens. You may be surprised at how little actually does happen.

• If nothing much happens, think about your customers’ behavior, and whether it actually involves Facebook. 

• If you determine your customers can find you just fine without Facebook, make the boycott permanent. 

The bottom line is this: You shouldn’t have to support evil in order to market your business. You have options. And you can be a better organization for investigating those options.