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Fox News has been the target of an ad boycott every year or two for the past decade. They did not lead to any meaningful change. Every time they get rid of th
by fludlight 6y ago
Fox News has been the target of an ad boycott every year or two for the past decade. They did not lead to any meaningful change.
Every time they get rid of the most egregious hosts and replace them with new ones. The new ones start out moderate, then inevitably drift to extremism. The advertisers have plausible deniability for half of their employees and customers. The other half don't care or are cheering Fox.
Mutual fund companies do something similar with underperforming funds. They cull the worst performers and the remainder make the whole fund family look good due to the magic of survivorship bias.
Facebook is obviously drastically different than Fox. That said, they are a large company and organizational inertia is very hard to overcome. Right now FB is optimized to promote quantity of engagement without regard to quality. Turning down the heat and promoting civility would result in fewer posts, which would mean fewer ad impressions. That's not happening.
- berdario 6y agoFox News doesn't change because apparently they don't get most of their money from advertisement, but rather from cable bundling https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/31/1933075/-If-you-have-cable-you-are-subsidizing-Fox-News-It-might-be-time-to-cut-the-cord-Here-s-how https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/31/1933075/-If-you-hav...
- methodsignature 6y agoI'd imagine individual shows are still more wholly tied to ad dollars. Doesn't defeat your point.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rossdavidh 6y agoAgreed. Another reason, besides inertia, is that optimizing for quantity of engagement is something you can program a computer to do, reasonably easily (although I'm sure they're very good at it). Optimizing for quality of engagement is, if not impossible, then at the very least a lot harder. It would probably also require a LOT more moderation, and that brings with it a whole host of other political landmines. It is worth considering, that a "link everyone to everyone, without any particular topic or purpose in mind" social network, is just a bad idea. Goodreads, LinkedIn, StackOverflow, they're none of them perfect, but they're all a lot better than Facebook. They also all have some purpose. I think Facebook may not be fixable. So long as it makes money, though, it will not go anywhere.
- viburnum 6y agoFox News has dropped anchors because of ad boycotts.