Like First Two Boycotts, Media Lobby’s Third Meta Boycott Fails

The so-called “#DayWithoutMeta” boycott has failed in spectacular fashion. Has the media lobby finally learned this tactic won’t work?

History has repeated itself. The media lobby groups third Meta boycott has failed. Not only did it fail, but it failed in spectacular fashion.

The first Meta boycott took place back in July. It was kicked off by the Canadian government, initiating an advertiser boycott of Meta. The boycott pretty much failed the day it kicked off when the current governing Liberal party refused to participate in their own boycott they were trying to start. The handful of hardcore supporters of the legislation were forced to go it alone and, ultimately, couldn’t make a financial dent in Meta. As a result, the boycott crashed and burned.

Undeterred, the media lobby groups took a different tactic. FRIENDS, last month, launched a user boycott of Meta. The boycott faced an uphill battle from the start. Users most commonly use Facebook to communicate with each other and share memes and funny pictures or video’s. This despite the insistence by lobby groups who argue that everyone uses Facebook to read the news. That delusional stance was driven head on into reality and reality won. The second boycott ended in abysmal failure.

You would think all that would have been a lesson that the boycott rout is going nowhere. Hilariously, the media lobby groups were still undeterred. Replicating the classic definition of insanity, media lobby groups launched another user boycott, probably thinking that third time is the charm. It was similar to the second boycott and the media lobby groups were gunning for the idea that repeating their second effort would yield different results.

The boycott was quite disorganized with only a single English article even mentioning this boycott was happening. There was no rallying page for everyone to get organized that we saw, just the hashtag of “#DayWithoutMeta” and seemingly the hope that things will just magically work out after. Of course, that didn’t stop the bold claims of how “Journalists across Canada” are pushing for this. September 15th came and the claims were slightly dialed back to say that Quebec journalists are pushing for this. Still, they said that this boycott will send a strong message to Meta and that Quebec won’t be intimidated.

Well, the lobby groups were right about one thing: the boycott did send a strong message to Meta, just not the message they had intended. As the day progressed, only four users turned up on X/Twitter to show their support. Almost no one bothered to show up for this boycott. Even Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, didn’t bother to participate in the boycott, posting to Instagram the day the boycott happened. Not only did users not join in, but most of the journalism world didn’t bother to show their support either. The ones that did bother showing up, totalling in numbers that you could count on one hand, got little to no traction on social media for their efforts. So, yes, the boycott sent a strong message to Meta. That message being that Meta has nothing to worry about here.

Even more humiliating was that broadcast media didn’t bother covering the boycott. In fact, most publications tried to pretend that this boycott didn’t happen in the first place, no doubt realizing just how humiliating the defeat was. Even the Victoria Buzz, which is where we even caught wind of this boycott in the first place, doesn’t appear to have any follow up to their original post. As a result, they seemingly decided to pretend it never happened. They were probably too embarrassed by the abysmal turnout.

A quick scan of the headlines in general shows that the media has basically forgotten about this boycott. The only mention we saw was from the Al Jazeera article from yesterday. There’s no sign that Meta has moved from their position in response to this boycott, either.

The writing was probably on the wall the day the boycott happened, but either way, we can definitively say that this boycott has become complete failure. In fact, arguably, this is probably the biggest boycott failure by the media lobby groups yet. At least a handful of users participated in the August protest. With respect to the advertiser boycott, there were at least a couple of suckers that decided to participate, kneecapping their own reach over that failed boycott. In this case, with only 4 posts on Twitter and nothing to show for it, this boycott has failed the hardest out of the three boycotts dreamed up by the lobby groups. The delusional images by the lobby groups of all of Canada standing united for their cause has been shattered by the reality that few even care about this.

What makes this failure all the more humiliating for the lobby groups is the fact that this is the media we are talking about. Publicity doesn’t get much better than when the media itself are the ones gunning for this in the first place. The fact that their cause elicited a collective “meh” from the public really shows how little influence the outlets have over the public these days. A failure like this shouldn’t have happened with all that publicity firepower wielded by the media. Yet, here we are today with arguably one of the sorriest turnouts for a “protest” ever. There’s no two ways about this: this is a massive humiliation for the media lobby groups.

So, now, the question is, is three failures enough for the media lobby groups? We’ve had one boycott every month so far, so will we see a fourth dead on arrival boycott of Meta next month too? Time will tell if this third failure is enough for the media lobby to figure out that this tactic isn’t going to work. If not, well, looking forward to reporting on the media lobby groups 4th failure in a few weeks time. We could all use the laugh.

Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.