With the recent news of Meta rolling back many of its anti-hate policies and making some deliberate changes which make the platform not just unwelcoming, but actively hostile towards the LGBTIQ+ community, many of us are announcing our departure from Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Threads. This kind of direct action is great and I wouldn’t advise anyone who no longer feels safe or welcome on these platforms to do anything different, it did lead me to ask the question “is this kind of individual boycott enough?”.

As you can probably guess by the title of this post: my current opinion is no, it’s not. The main reason for that can be summed up in the phrase:

You are Meta’s Product not its Customer

The thing about platforms like the ones Meta owns, is that they make profit off of their user-base, but not directly from their user-base. The linguistic difference is slight but the difference between the two wordings can be made clear if we ask the question “who is paying Meta?”

The answer to this question is of course: not you and not me. We may scroll through the content provided by Meta’s servers on a daily basis, but we are offered this service free of charge. This means that average end-users are not Meta’s customers. Because we don’t pay for the service, our withdrawal from said service on an individual level has very little impact on Meta’s revenue (and in fact, in some situations, may hurt us more than help us… but more on that later).

So who is Meta’s customer? The advertisers.

The advertisers pay Meta exorbitant amounts of money for the chance to tap into its network and gain access to a targeted user-base. On Facebook alone, at least 3 million businesses pay Meta for the privilege of showing targetted ads to you.

This means that Meta’s end-users, people like you and me, are the product being sold to advertisers. This also means that Meta can do whatever they want as long as they can convince advertisers that they are still the best ad network to spend money on.

The advertisers and their willingness to spend money on the platform have the most influence on Meta’s day to day profit.

What else can be done?

Unfortunately Meta’s new stand against LGBTIQ+ people is not the first time a platform has become openly hostile towards marginalised communities. With Elon Musk’s controversial takeover of Twitter we saw something remarkable happen. Not only did many marginalised groups leave, but so too did many of the brands that Twitter relied on for income. With Musk’s increasingly hateful outpourings, brands started to feel uncomfortable with their content showing up next to hate speech. Articles like X value now down 80% since Elon Musk takeover show that brands pulling out their support had a lasting impact on the company.

So for those of you who have not left yet, here’s what you can do:

Don’t hesitate to message brands directly and ask if their continued support of Meta means that they are withdrawing their annual support of your city’s Gay Pride Parade.

It’s an uphill battle for sure, but we have to start somewhere.

An argument for those who choose to stay on Meta (at least for now)

We as a community have spent a long time curating and building up resources as well as uplifting small businesses that directly serve the LGBTIQ+ community. The truth is… many of these communities and businesses will not survive if we all leave Meta.

Eventually we will find other platforms that feel safer for our communities and move the queer businesses and resources there, but let’s not destroy the existing network in the process. If you feel compelled to stay on Meta because your revenue or fan-base is centred there, do start making accounts on alternative platforms and encourage your fanbase to migrate over, but don’t alienate yourself in the process. Give it some time and the community will follow.