‘Morally Impossible’: Some Advertisers Take a Timeout From Facebook | The New York Times

Nima Gardideh, the co-founder of a digital advertising agency, has encouraged his clients to hold back millions in advertising dollars from Facebook.

It struck him as “borderline tone-deaf” to run ads on social media platforms when they were being used to organize protests against racism and police brutality, he said. And the money spent on ads might have been wasted, since the usual concerns of consumers seemed not to amount to much at a historic moment.

But there was something else weighing on his mind: Facebook’s hands-off attitude toward President Trump’s aggressive, misleading posts.

“We harshly disagree with how Facebook has approached this,” said Mr. Gardideh, the co-founder of Pearmill, a New York marketing agency with a dozen clients, mostly tech start-ups. “For the past couple of years, this problem has become bigger and bigger. These massive platforms have to care about free speech issues to some extent, but Facebook is on the extreme end of not caring.”