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by spikefromspace 2203 days ago
How many of FB users would need to have adblockers and commit to never clicking on an ad in facebook to cause a big enough dip in revenue in Q2 (ends this month)? Especially given already depressed levels of online advertising spend. I don't mean this in a "lets take down FB" way but more of a "how can we force Zuckerberg to have more discussion/thought on this and brush it away?".

My personal opinion is that FB should at least add some sort of fact check warning but definitely not censor content.

3 comments

"How many resolving DNS servers would need to blackhole Facebook IP address space?" might be a more interesting question.
This a really interesting thought. I do wonder how much the quantity “big enough” would have to be in this case.

With respect to adding fact checking, I 100% agree with you, but I’m conflicted over whether or not censoring should be a thing, because I think that censoring people is generally wrong, but also feel that it’s important to discourage inciting violence.

Facebook already censors plenty of its users for far milder speech than trump's wont. And let's be real, Facebook and Twitter couldn't deplatform the president if they tried. No matter where he goes, reporters will broadcast the hell out of it. All else fails, the white house has its own webpage that has historically been used to communicate with the public.
For me personally, its not just about Trump. I have lots of friends who share critical news without a source. I always encourage them to but of course who listens these days. So for me, even a short warning message on such posts could go a long way.
Given that its closer to end of quarter, I would think erasing even a couple percentage points off the top line revenue is "big enough". I don't know enough about FB financials however to know. Hoping some FB employees chime in...
I'm going to guess that FB has that information since most Facebook users adblock via a plugin
I work in the martech space and surprisingly adblocker usage is still not that high from what I can gather (I am pretty new). I dont necessarily think of ads as evil but since it is the way we are paying for this service, its a good way for us to use it as leverage to see desired changes in the platform.
That’s crazy surprising