Opinion
Meta claims it’s ‘business as usual’, so will the ad industry hold its nose or will it act on the moral and business cases that question social media?
Meta’s Q4 results just came out: $48.39bn in revenue.
The company is funded almost exclusively by advertising and it is clearly a tremendously successful advertising business.
But successful at what cost?
Mental health vs Meta’s wealth
Some other results recently came out that offer some context.
A study by University College London found that, between 2012 and 2022, there was a 65% increase in five- to 18-year-olds admitted to acute hospital wards suffering from a mental health crisis.
That’s nearly 40,000 children a year. Just in the UK.
The study came out after Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly took her own life after seeing toxic content online, urged the government to take tougher action on internet safety for young people.
Russell accused Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk of a “wholesale recalibration” of the online world and a “bonfire of digital ethics and online safety features”.
“All of us will lose,” he said. “But our children lose the most.”
Reporting the UCL study, The Times quoted Bernadka Dubicka, a professor of child psychiatry at the University of York, who said: “The contagious influence of potentially harmful social media content needs to be further examined.”
Experts regularly draw a line between social media companies like Meta and deteriorating mental health. An online search will offer many examples.
Social media companies challenge this, but many take it seriously. The EU is investigating Meta over child safety and mental health concerns. Australia recently became the first country to try to ban social media for under-16s.
Anti-social media
It isn’t just mental health. It’s hard to find a modern social ill that social media isn’t fuelling.
Algorithms that create echo chambers that undermine democracy? Helping to create and sustain the fake news era? Enabling hate speech? Check, check and check — or, if you’re Meta, stop checking.
Then there’s the long history of corporate scandals — a back catalogue including fines for privacy violation and over-claiming audience size. At the moment, Meta faces an anti-trust lawsuit in the US (perhaps another reason to go full Donald Trump).
Advertisers have to balance business with ethics. That’s not always easy. Meta works for many advertisers. And it’s not like there isn’t any quality content on its platforms. Plus, specific media choices are just one thing on a kaleidoscopic list of things for busy marketers to worry about.
This is hard terrain for planners, whose influence and resolve in this is critical. Having sounded out senior planners before writing this, I know they care deeply about these issues and are increasingly conflicted about putting Meta on the plan.
But they have a job to do for their clients and Meta does a job.
‘Too big to fail’? Industry reacts to Meta content moderation changes
Business as usual?
If any advertiser had wanted a moral or ethical reason not to give Meta money, they were spoiled for choice long before Meta’s recent ditching of DEI initiatives and removal of third-party fact-checkers (only in the US — to start with).
Should we expect anything different now?
The advertiser base of Meta is made up of countless small and medium-sized businesses or sole traders that often rely on them as their primary way to market. This giant tail is estimated to account for somewhere around 80% of its revenue.
Meta can probably take them for granted (although not The HelenaSips Wine Academy, at least — you can read Hamish Nicklin’s take here).
But what about the big advertisers?
Meta’s Nicola Mendelsohn has been talking with big advertisers in recent weeks to reassure them and help them “get past the headlines”. “There is no change,” she is reported saying. “Absolutely no change. It is business as usual.”
Not strictly true, that — unless everyone misread the new direction Meta is heading. If you’re unclear, you should watch her Davos interview. She spells out the ideal Meta future in Europe (it’s like the one it’s forging in the US).
“Advertisers can choose where they do or they don’t want to place their ads,” said Mendelsohn. “If we have an advertiser that doesn’t want to be next to societal issues or political issues, their ads won’t appear next to it.”
That’s the idea, certainly. But while a brand may try to avoid rubbing shoulders with unappealing Meta content, their money inevitably supports the proliferation of harmful content on Meta regardless.
Will brands embrace ads on Threads?
Back the business case
Some have suggested that this isn’t like the X-odus, when advertisers left once it started giving off a toxic musk. X wasn’t as important on the plan. Meta matters more, they say.
It’s here that we could step away from potentially unpersuasive moral arguments and look at the business case. Who needs ethics? Just act in financial self-interest. Be more Meta.
The most-read strategy article on The Media Leader last year was the revelation that bigger brands are overspending on social media by a factor of three. If you haven’t read it, please do. Hopefully “most read” means “most acted on”.
Brands could be spending three times too much on social. You read that right
Shrugging on the shoulders of tech giants?
Is the ad industry doing a collective shrug regarding Meta and carrying on business as usual?
Is it that Meta’s imperfections, to put it mildly, are so manifold and manifest, have become so normalised, that we’ve reached a sort of industrial ostrich effect?
Maybe, but there are glimmers of hope.
We should all be heartened by moves like that of Outvertising. It announced that it will no longer work with Meta. Meta wields significant soft power in our industry by, for example, hosting events at its premises — including for Outvertising.
We need an exit plan for Meta and we need it now
Refusing Meta’s deep-pocketed largesse is hard because, although the organisation might be increasingly toxic, the people who work for it that I have met are nice, charming, decent people.
Another sliver of upside is that Meta’s behaviour draws even more clear water between the trusted, regulated media that care about creating quality advertising environments by preventing harmful content, and those that do not.
Advertisers care, too, and they have it in their power to shape the future of the industry — one that can’t be associated with harm.
Because if social media companies like Meta can’t be trusted to protect children on their platforms, why would advertisers trust them with their brands?

Lindsey Clay is CEO of Thinkbox