There are a number of companies who have executives who make business decisions that are morally questionable. I have often said its best not to use those companies, but often it's not possible.
Boycotts are effective: I have participated in one against Australia's Kyle Sandilands. You won't always be able to do this, however.
I disagree. Saying "don't like it? don't use it" is in a very real sense equivalent to advocating for unethical practices to continue - because that is what past experience shows will happen.
There are countless companies with unethical business practices, with extremely complex, ever changing ownership webs (and looking at the actual people who own the shares makes it even more complex). Figuring out which companies to boycott is much more than a full-time job, and has been shown to rarely work (e.g. there wasn't much of a boycott even in the case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#Aiding_an...) - the complexity of organizing a boycott for every unethical company is simply too great.
Well, one possible point of a boycott is to send a message to the extent possible. "Infecting users will ruin your brand" is one possible message. The brand's buyers also bought its legacy.
I'm not in the US and I was a bit taken aback when people on my Twitter timeline started calling for boycotts of a certain online sticker service entirely because the CEO came out on Twitter as supporting Trump a few weeks ago.
I've only seen this form of complete isolation as part of feminist "no platform"-ing (basically: actively excluding speakers because of their political views, regardless of the topic of the conference or occasion) before. But this time it wasn't simply about fringe extremists (e.g. racial supremacists) but about all supporters of the final candidate of one of the two major parties.
I hope this is the end of this practice rather than the start of something worse. Demonising half (or a third, depending on how you measure) the population is not how you fix social issues, especially if it desensitises people to slurs you will still need to label the real extremists.
Is boycotting Goya in response to that a bad thing? Should #boycottgoya hashtags on social media be deleted, for example?
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