No market for disinformation

The advertising boycott of Facebook and its subsidiaries, like Instagram, has gathered momentum with some speed. Over 600 brands have publicly pulled back from advertising on Facebook in the last few days. The boycott was triggered by Facebook’s refusal to proactively remove hate content and fact-check misleading information or lies in political advertising. It happened in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests.

Facebook (along with Google) is one of the two largest consolidated global media platforms. Facebook earned $70 billion in 2019 as advertising revenues and that amounted to 98 per cent of its total revenues. The network, or