Zuckerberg loses over $7 billion as major companies halt ad spending on platform: Report

Mark Zuckerberg lost over $7 billion as major companies pull their ads from Facebook-owned platforms amid the “Stop Hate for Profit Campaign.”

The social media giant witnessed a major drop in share price on Friday after Unilever, one of the world’s largest advertisers said that it would halt all ad spendings on Facebook and Instagram till the end of the year.

The drop in share prices lowered Zuckerberg’s net worth down to $82.3 billion as per Bloomberg Billionaires Index bringing the Facebook CEO down to the fourth position,

Forbes reported. Zuckerberg was overtaken by Louis Vuitton chief Bernard Arnault who made it to the world’s three richest people’s list following Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates as per the index.

Unilever on June 26 announced that it would halt all ad spending on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter through the end of 2020, The

Wall Street Journal reported. The company that usually spends over $1 billion each year in ad spends joined a long list of companies who’ve banned ads on Facebook-owned social media platforms.

Last week, major organizations including the NAACP, the Anti-Defamation League, Color of Change, and Free Press had launched “Stop Hate for Profit,” campaign calling upon advertisers to pull their ad spending on Facebook through the month of July in protest against its policies. The campaign referred to the protests against police brutality and racism following the murder of a black man George Floyd under police custody. More than 90 companies including Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s, and Verizon have halted ad spendings on the social media platform, the Verge reported.

“We invest billions of dollars each year to keep our community safe and continuously work with outside experts to review and update our policies. We know we have more work to do, and we’ll continue to work with civil rights groups, GARM, and other experts to develop even more tools, technology and policies to continue this fight,” said a Facebook spokesperson as quoted by NBC News.