Ad Boycott Organizers Decry Facebook's Inertia on Hate Speech

Facebook executives met Tuesday with civil rights leaders leading the “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign, but failed to convince them the company is fully committed to clearing its platforms of toxic hate speech and misinformation.

Since the movement launched June 17, nearly 1,000 advertisers from Blue Bottle Coffee to Blue Shield of California are boycotting the platform this month. That won campaign organizers a Zoom meeting with top brass at Facebook, but little else.

"The meeting we just left was a disappointment. Facebook has had our demands in multiple ways and they showed up to the meeting expecting an 'A' for attendance," said Rashad Robinson of the nonprofit Color of Change.

"We got no details, no clarity and no result," said Jonathan Greenblatt, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "Facebook should have a zero tolerance policy on intolerance, like every other company in America."

The Coalition Outlined 10 Asks:

Accountability

1. Establish and empower permanent civil rights infrastructure, including C-suite level executive with civil rights expertise to evaluate products and policies for discrimination, bias and hate.

2. Submit to regular, third party, independent audits of identity-based hate and misinformation with summary results published on a publicly accessible website.

3. Provide audit of and refund to advertisers whose ads were shown next to content that was later removed for violations of terms of service.

Decency

4. Find and remove public and private groups focused on white supremacy, militia, anti-Semitism, violent conspiracies, Holocaust denialism, vaccine misinformation and climate denialism.

5. Adopting common-sense changes to their policies that will help stem radicalization and hate on the platform.

6. Stop recommending or otherwise amplifying groups or content from groups associated with hate, misinformation or conspiracies to users.

7. Create an internal mechanism to automatically flag hateful content in private groups for human review.

8. Ensure accuracy in political and voting matters by eliminating the politician exemption; removing misinformation related to voting; and prohibiting calls to violence by politicians in any format.

Support

9. Create expert teams to review submissions of identity-based hate and harassment.

10. Enable individuals facing severe hate and harassment to connect with a live Facebook employee.

Growing Public Pressure

For years, the social network has faced public pressure from activists, academics and politicians urging it to tackle toxic speech and misinformation, even when those inflammatory posts come from President Trump.

Despite a string of public apologies, it remains unclear whether Facebook's various investments in hate speech control are simply ineffectual, or purposely designed to fend off criticism while profiting from the popularity of incendiary communication.

Facebook watchers widely blame the global social media giant for failing to respond in time to warnings about posts that led to the genocide against the Rohingya people in Myanmar, and then encouraging political polarization in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election..

Even now, ostensibly sensitized to the danger of extremist groups egging members on to violence, the company only moved to crack down on the boogaloo movement after the deaths of a law enforcement officer in Santa Cruz and a security officer in Oakland in June.

In a statement, Facebook responded: "This meeting was an opportunity for us to hear from the campaign organizers and reaffirm our commitment to combating hate on our platform," the statement said. "They want Facebook to be free of hate speech and so do we. That's why it's so important that we work to get this right. As a company, we have agreed to an independent civil rights audit."

Facebook also noted the company has "invested billions" both people and technology to keep hate off of the platform.

While that 100-page civil rights audit found "some significant improvements in the platform, we have also watched the company make painful decisions over the last nine months with real world consequences that are serious setbacks for civil rights."

The auditors go on to warn, "Facebook has made policy and enforcement choices that leave our election exposed to interference by the President and others who seek to use misinformation to sow confusion and suppress voting."

Even before its release, Robinson expressed doubts the release would lead to any concrete change at Facebook. "We've been working with them for years, and we know there are a lot of good, well-intentioned people at Facebook, but the company is functionally flawed," he said.

Jessica González, CEO of the media reform advocacy group Free Press, added she feels a sense of urgency in this political moment. "We're tired of the dialogue because the stakes are so incredibly high for our communities as we get closer to the 2020 election — as we face COVID-19 and the impact that's having in our communities, particularly the disproportionate death rates in Black and Latinx communities," she said. "We're seeing Facebook fail to meet the moment. Here we see Facebook directly profiting off of political ads that dehumanize immigrants and brown people."

Facebook spokespeople point to the company's global network of 70 fact-checking partners that review and rate content in more than 50 languages. "Once a piece of content is rated false by fact-checkers, we reduce it’s [sic] distribution and show warning labels with more context."

Greenblatt noted Zuckerberg boasted in their meeting that Facebook's artificial intelligence software captures 89 percent of the hate content. "All right. They've given us something of a numerator, but we don't know the denominator. Because they never made public the full extent of the hate content on the platform. So we are unable to judge the progress they've really made," Greenblatt said.

The activists acknowledged other social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube also struggle to identify and block hate speech, but noted they're focused on Facebook because of its unmatched size.

"It has a customer base like no other. Facebook is not just not serving the civil rights community with this. They're not serving the general public. They're not serving their [advertising] customers because businesses don't want their brands published alongside horrible, hateful, divisive content," Greenblatt said.

But given the fact many advertisers are expected to return to Facebook after the boycott ends with the advent of August, it's not clear how effective the campaign will be in forcing the social media giant to make lasting changes. In a private meeting last week with employees, Zuckerberg reportedly said, “My guess is that all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough.”