What if the world's biggest advertisers boycott social media?
A top-50 advertiser freeze is a sharp, short-duration revenue air-pocket for Meta and Snap, concentrated and headline-driven — the cascade's risk-off/VIX bid fits a fast scare. The template is the 2020 'Stop Hate for Profit' boycott, which dented sentiment but barely moved Meta's actual ad revenue as advertisers returned within a quarter. Skeptical: boycotts historically lack staying power because reach is irreplaceable; fade the initial gap rather than chase it.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Top 50 global advertisers freeze social spend after extremist-content scandal, slashing Meta and Snap revenue. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.