Notes

Publication: economictimes.indiatimes.com

View: Global brands shouldn't enable a media ecosystem that poisons our society
BYSruthijith KKET Bureau 6 mins readJul 03, 2020, 11:45 PM IST

5-6 minutes

The great pandemic-led upheaval is also witnessing a long-overdue reckoning in advertising. Last week, companies with some of the biggest marketing budgets on the planet, including Unilever, Coca-Cola, Verizon and Starbucks, partly or fully pulled advertising from Facebook. They are responding to a boycott campaign, ‘Stop Hate for Profit’, mounted by a group of civil rights organisations in the US. These organisations have chronicled years of insufficient action by Facebook, and other social media majors, on the spread of hate speech, abuse and fake news. And brands have responded.

So, what took so long?

Global corporations profess to care deeply about operating ethically. They tell us often what they are doing to make their supply chain sustainable, or labour free of exploitation. But when it comes to the second order impact of their advertising, which has now been known for years, many turn a blind eye.

The awareness and advocacy around these issues is thankfully growing. In Britain, a similar campaign, ‘Stop Funding Hate’, which appeals to advertisers not to support media publications that demonise minorities and foreigners, has been gaining traction.

Problems with the qualitative part of advertising have long been understood and critiqued, as most recently evidenced by the withdrawal of skin whitening creams from around the world by major brands. But focus on the harmful effects of ‘media spend’ decisions — where and how the budget gets spent — is insufficient, especially in digital. Part of the reason is that digital advertising is still in its infancy. Facebook is only 15 years old, while modern advertising has been around for at least 200 years.

Even within this short time frame, the technologies that have made social media platforms so addictive for users, and so cheap and precise for advertisers, are all still more recent and evolving.

Digital advertising poses two dangers to brands. One, on social media, their ad could appear next to, say, a call for genocide — thinly veiled or otherwise. The post might get pulled down later. But user-generated media is not vetted ahead of publication, and the damage will be done.

This works in many different ways. In 2017, there was an uproar among advertisers when an ad for Mercedes-Benz vehicles was served on an Islamic State (IS) recruitment video on YouTube.

The other is a more unseen effect. Social media incentivises the creation of divisive, false and inflammatory content. This is because this kind of material gets more clicks and engagement in the fact-free ideological echo chambers of social media. Anyone on the internet can publish outright falsehoods on a website designed to look like a news site and watch it go viral on social media because users share ‘news’ that confirms their biases. Virality means more traffic to these pages, which are monetised through ads served by algorithms. The company that paid for the reach doesn’t even know their ad appeared on a page that was spreading, say, a dangerous falsehood about a racial or religious group.

Hiding behind the ruse that it’s not their job to be arbiters of truth, social media platforms have struck at the root of our ability to possess a shared chronicle of events and carry out informed debate. The powerful engines they created to make their offerings ‘stickier’, enable and incentivise the poisoning of our minds at mass scale. These have also been weaponised by vested interests.

Responsible brand custodians are aware of such issues and have been working with platforms to remedy the situation. But the needle hasn’t moved very much. Filtering out fake news and active moderation of hate speech are, indeed, complex problems to solve without compromising margins. But brands must recognise that until it is not done, these are not fit landscapes for their messaging and that they shouldn’t enable a media ecosystem that poisons our societies. A code for responsible advertising, encompassing digital and traditional formats, which recognises the calamitous currents of our times, needs to evolve.

The audience of most platforms and publications can be reached elsewhere. The digital technologies that made advertising more efficient are now ubiquitous. Advertise on platforms that vet content before it is published and guarantee brand safety. Embrace publications that are professionally produced, uphold standards and inform the audience. Stay clear of divisiveness, dog whistlers, conspiracy theorists, supremacists and anti-science propagandists, irrespective of the platform and formats. It’s really not that hard.

This can seem like a self-serving argument for a mainstream journalist to make. But the line in the sand is not between print and digital. It’s between harmful and beneficial content. And the latter is also produced by any number of independent creators and bloggers. As they say in the ads — choose wisely.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed are author's own)