From SFGATE
Facebook ad boycott could succeed where policymaking failed
By Ben Brody, Naomi Nix and David McLaughlin, Bloomberg
For years, Facebook has succeeded for years in fending off critics and regulators in Washington who have complained about its market power and its failure to protect privacy, police hate speech and curb political disinformation.
Now, a boycott by major advertisers and a subsequent slide in its shares are forcing the world's largest social media network to reckon with the very issues that policymakers have long failed to resolve...
"We have gotten to a tipping point," said Hany Farid, a professor at University of California-Berkeley. "The Trump administration, Covid, Black Lives Matter, the ugliness social media is surfacing — I think people finally realize this is not OK, this is not an open exchange of ideas. This is blatant hatefulness and divisiveness."
Hany Farid is a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and EECS. He specializes in digital forensics.
