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June 24, 2020 
By DYLAN BYERS in Los Angeles & AHIZA GARCÍA-HODGES in San Francisco Good morning. ⚾ Baseball is back. The 60-game season will start on July 23 or 24. Every team will use a designated hitter and in extra innings each team will start with a runner on second base.
🎙️ Today online: I talk to YouTube product chief Neal Mohan (10:15 a.m. ET) and UTA chief Jeremy Zimmer (1:20 p.m. ET) for the Collision From Home conference.
Join the Market: 🗞️ Newsletter | 🎙️ Podcast
Bloomberg/Getty Sense & symbolism Mark Zuckerberg is facing an ad boycott. Does it matter?
Moving the Market: "Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream and retailer Eddie Bauer are the latest in a string of brands to pull their advertising from Facebook, joining the likes of Patagonia, The North Face and REI in an activist campaign forcing the social network to counteract hate speech on its platform," our colleague Claire Atkinson reports.
• The boycott is part of The Stop Hate for Profit campaign, which started last week and is "spearheaded by a coalition of organizations including the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Common Sense and other civil rights groups who said Facebook is not doing enough to keep hate speech off its platforms."
The big questions: 1. How much revenue does Facebook actually stand to lose because of the boycott? 2. Will this actually force Facebook to change its policies on hate speech — and, if so, what policies would Facebook change?
1. Revenue: Facebook won't say how much revenue they stand to lose from these boycotts. But the company took in $70 billion in ad revenue last year and, despite the toll the coronavirus pandemic has taken on advertising, will still grow revenue this year (albeit less than past years).
• The loss of a handful of brands — Arc'teryx and Magnolia Pictures are also on the list — won't do meaningful damage to a company that's bringing in $70 billion-plus in ad revenue. Moreover, it's not clear how long some of these brands intend to withhold ad dollars.
• Meanwhile, as Bloomberg's Kurt Wagner notes, almost 76 percent of Facebook’s advertising revenue comes from small- and medium-sized businesses, many of which "can’t afford to pause spending on the social network," as it's "their main online outpost."
2. Policy: "The Stop Hate campaign has a list of demands for Facebook that include creating a separate moderation channel for people who say they’ve been a target because of their race or religion, and releasing data on the volume of hate speech on the platform and what action was taken," Atkinson reports.
• It's worth noting here that Facebook is already taking aggressive steps to fight hate speech. A new E.U. report finds tech firms have vastly improved efforts to counter illegal hate speech since 2016, and notes Facebook is the only one among them that has a system in place to inform users about how flagged content is handled.
• But the coalition's main demand is that Facebook stop generating ad revenue from hate speech. This is a harder demand to satisfy, since Facebook already has a policy on hate speech, which is to take it down entirely. There's not really any middle ground.
What's next: If a critical mass of advertisers boycott, it could start to affect Facebook's bottom line. But even then, it's not entirely clear what change they would hope to force at Facebook, other than some symbolic gestures — the separate moderation channel, for instance — that would simply reinforce the work Facebook is already doing.
Bloomberg/Getty Future of speech Jack Dorsey vs. Trump, con't.
Big in the Bay, big in the Beltway: Twitter has added another warning label to a tweet by President Trump in which he threatened to use "serious force" against protesters if they tried to established an autonomous zone in Washington, D.C.
• The big picture: The move further escalates Twitter's "battle with the president over his often incendiary tweets," NYT's Kate Conger reports, and further sets Twitter apart from companies like Facebook "that have avoided taking action on the president’s posts."
🇺🇸 Election 2020 🇺🇸
Jack Dorsey is giving U.S. Twitter employees a day off on Nov. 3 so they can vote. Employees around the world will also get paid time off to vote in their own national elections.
• It's yet another progressive step from Dorsey, who was among the first CEOs to make Juneteenth a company holiday and to give his employees the option to work from home forever.
James Leynse/Getty Antitrust watch Pierre Omidyar vs. big tech
Big in the Bay: "Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay... has quietly become one of Facebook, Amazon and Google's biggest antagonists" by leveraging the Omidyar Network to fight the power and influence of big tech, The Information's Chris Stern reports.
• "The group has [also] funded smaller advocacy organizations such as Public Knowledge and Open Markets Institute, which are among big tech’s most active critics in Washington."
• The backstory: "Omidyar and his wife Pam founded the Omidyar Network in 2004... focusing on issues [like] global poverty and... educational opportunity. [He] reorganized the group in 2018 with a focus on the market power and influence of tech companies."
The big picture: "Omidyar Network is one of several initiatives led by deep-pocketed entrepreneurs opposing the business tactics of tech firms. ... But Omidyar, who made his fortune in technology, is pursuing a broader campaign against big tech."
What's next: "In the last month, the Omidyar Network released the first two in what it expects to be a series of papers laying out potential antitrust cases against Google and Facebook." This comes as "federal and state authorities are intensifying their investigations into tech."
• "The work [has] caught the eye of Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who has been one of the most vociferous advocates on Capitol Hill for checking the power of big tech firms."
Randy Holmes/Getty Dept. of regrets Jimmy Kimmel apologizes
Talk of Tinseltown: After weeks of public pressure, Jimmy Kimmel has apologized for decades-old comedic sketches in which he wore dark makeup to impersonate celebrities like Karl Malone and Oprah Winfrey, our colleague Doha Madani reports.
• "I apologize to those who were genuinely hurt or offended by the makeup I wore or the words I spoke," the ABC late-night host said. He also called the sketches "embarrassing," and said he has "evolved and matured over the last twenty-plus years."
The big picture: Comedians are facing a reckoning for past behavior amid the national push for racial justice. Jimmy Fallon has apologized for a 20-year-old sketch in which he impersonated Chris Rock in blackface. Tina Fey has asked that four episodes of "30 Rock" that included blackface be removed from streaming platforms.
Handout/Getty Virtual reckoning Gaming industry confronts sexual harassment
State of gaming: "Major companies that either stream or work with video games, including Twitch, Microsoft and YouTube, said they were investigating recent allegations of misconduct that surfaced online in recent days," our colleague Kalhan Rosenblatt reports.
• "Over the weekend, a host of sexual misconduct and racism allegations were made against many in the video gaming world, some of whom use Twitch, YouTube and other platforms."
The big picture: The outpouring has led to at least one executive resignation and "a moment of reflection for an industry that has often contended with sexism, bullying and allegations of abuse," NYT's Taylor Lorenz and Kellen Browning report.
• "The response has been a far cry from Gamergate in 2014, when women faced threats of death and sexual assault for critiquing the industry’s male-dominated, sexist culture. Now, some are optimistic that real change could come."
🎇 What's next: Fireworks! Our colleague Ben Popken explains why 2020 could be the best year ever for fireworks sellers who initially thought the coronavirus pandemic would kill their sales.
See you tomorrow.
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