MARKETING MAGAZINE 2021
Preventing online abuse without upsetting customers: Mission impossible? Can social activism jeopardize your brand relationships? As business and social interactions move online, various cybercrime activities soar too. Particularly alarming are EU and US reports indicating an increase of online child sexual exploitation and abuse during the pandemic. The Norwegian government’s own statistics show that 1 in 10 teenagers aged 9-17 years have created or shared online materials that could be classified as sexual exploitation. Both Norway and the European Council have therefore made the detection and prevention of internet-related child abuse one of their top national priorities. Firms operating online are increasingly expected to take social responsibility actions to detect, report and remove
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abuse material and prevent cybercrime. In July, the European Parliament derogated personal privacy laws to allow providers of electronic communication services to scan and report people’s private messages for material containing child sex abuse or attempts of child grooming. But what should firms do when supporting social activism may directly hurt customer experiences by breaching the privacy and trust of their customers? How can they help detect and prevent cybercrime without jeopardizing brand trust?
SLOW TECH GIANTS The role of corporations in promoting social activism has been controversial, with some firms
MATILDA DOROTIC Associate Professor Department of Marketing
creating and selling automated detection technologies to law enforcement (with its share of scandals) and online service providers like social media and gaming firms being reluctant to implement automated prevention technologies that may affect their users. Facebook, Twitter and Google have so far been slow and unwilling to identify and ban users for malicious actions in social media, such as spreading misinformation. The Centre for Countering Digital Hate analysis of 812,000 anti-vaccine posts showed that 65 percent of the content was attributable to social media posts from only 12 persons. Currently, only three of these have been banned from all three social media platforms.
Business leaders are generally divided on the responsibility of brands to promote social activism due to the adverse effect it may have on customers and stakeholders, according to a recent survey from the Chief Marketing Officer Council. CEOs who engage in public discussions on corporate social activism (CSA) topics, such as racism, elicits an adverse reaction from investors, who are not prone to risk the public backlash. On average, they evaluate CSA activities as a signal of the firm potentially moving away from profit-oriented objectives and toward a riskier and more uncertain outcome. The dilemmas become particularly tricky when employing artificial intelligence (AI) for
