I'll ignore for the moment questions about what "activists" is supposed to mean and whether it refers to a real group capable of making unified decisions. Regardless, it's just not great for leadership to blame a revenue drop on unrelated third parties even if those third parties are working against the company and taking credit for the revenue drop. This isn't like complaining that trolls came in and review bombed your movie on IMDb. Revenue is an actual metric. If the claim is that the revenue numbers are only very briefly down because advertisers are only pulling spend in response to some temporary PR issue, then sure, make that argument.