Microsoft and Sony are suspending advertising on Facebook, but it is less noble than it seems

There is currently a movement among some fairly large companies to remove their Facebook ads in the wake of that company’s failure to take action on disinformation and hate speech. While this has resulted in the departure of some major brands, so far it has been little more than a shrug from Mark Zuckerberg, who he believes will all eventually return.

Two of those companies are major gaming brands, Sony and Microsoft, which are reportedly withdrawing advertising that includes Facebook and Playstation promotions from Facebook. And yet, in both cases, this gesture does not appear to be as noble in practice as it initially appears.

In the case of Sony, they made a great public announcement about it:

“In support of the #StopHateForProfit campaign, we have globally suspended our Facebook and Instagram activity, including advertising and unpaid content, until the end of July. We advocate working (and playing) together forever.”

Did you get it? Is already It has a set end date of late July, so essentially this will just be Sony saving some cash on ads for a month. Of course we all know what’s coming after July and August, September and October will be the first months for the launch of the PS5, which will surely launch in November. And that’s clearly when advertising will be most important.

It’s a hollow gesture because Sony is literally putting an end date (many of these companies have) on when they will return, proving Zuckerberg’s point, no matter what Facebook does or doesn’t do to change the policies of this movement. you are supposed to protest against. All of this doesn’t make sense, and in the case of Sony, the ads will be back in the moment they really start to matter for PS5 promotion.

But Microsoft’s situation is probably even more incomplete.

While Microsoft didn’t make a big public statement about removing Facebook ads, a Bloomberg report indicates it did it anyway, though not in protest of any policy, but simply because it doesn’t want to appear alongside controversial topics.

Of course, Microsoft has a very intimate relationship with Facebook, as evidenced by the fact that it has just delivered hundreds of thousands of Mixer users to Facebook Gaming. When Mixer closed, it announced that all Mixer accounts would be converted to Facebook Gaming accounts, representing a massive partnership between the two companies. So yeah, I think that’s why we haven’t heard any public statement about Microsoft advertising directly.

In a perfect world, these companies would withdraw their Facebook ads until a real change was made on the platform and / or began to suffer financially legitimately. From what I’ve seen, this campaign doesn’t look like it’s going to accomplish any of that, and Zuckerberg knows it.

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