'Disappointing' Zuckerberg meeting fails to yield
results, say Facebook boycott organizers
Civil rights groups say company did not commit to
concrete plan to address hate speech and misinformation
The campaign also demands Facebook find and remove
public and private groups focused on white supremacy, antisemitism, violent
conspiracies, Holocaust denialism, vaccine misinformation, and climate
denialism.
Kari Paul
in San Francisco
Published
onWed 8 Jul 2020 00.00 BST
The
organizers behind a major advertiser boycott of Facebook have called a meeting
with Mark Zuckerberg and other executives “disappointing”, saying the company
failed to commit to concrete solutions for addressing hate speech and
misinformation on the platform.
Officials
at Facebook, including Zuckerberg, the CEO, and Sheryl Sandberg, chief
operating officer, met with members of the coalition of civil rights groups
over video chat for an hour on Tuesday to discuss the largest boycott in
Facebook history, which has gained the support of more than 1,000 of its
advertisers, including Unilever, Coca-Cola, and Starbucks.
But the
company offered little in terms of concrete solutions, said Rashad Robinson of
the Color of Change, one of the groups calling on advertisers to suspend
spending as part of the campaign, known as Stop Hate for Profit.
“Facebook
showed up to this meeting expecting a grade A for attendance,” he said.
“Attendance alone is not enough. At this point we were expecting some very
clear answers to the recommendations we put on the table, and we did not get
that. We did not get to the heart of these problems.”
Those
recommendations include putting someone with civil rights expertise in the C
suite at Facebook, submitting to regular third-party audits of hate and
misinformation, and removing the political exemptions that allow some public
figures to bypass hate speech rules on the platform. The opposition to
political exemptions has intensified in recent weeks after Donald Trump
appeared to call for shooting protesters, a post flagged as inappropriate on
Twitter but left up without action on Facebook.
The
campaign also demands Facebook find and remove public and private groups
focused on white supremacy, antisemitism, violent conspiracies, Holocaust
denialism, vaccine misinformation, and climate denialism.
In a
previous interview with the Guardian, Robinson said the campaign had reached a
critical mass that Facebook could no longer ignore. “What we have done
differently this time is to go directly to big advertisers who also have not
been able to get changes from the platform,” he said, “advertisers who see
their ads on Facebook showing up next to white supremacist and white
nationalist content and who have watched as Mark Zuckerberg has seen himself as
too powerful to have to listen.”
Facebook
declined to commit to any specific policies or timelines and declined to commit
to any of the 11 measures put forward by the coalition, the groups said in a
press conference following the meeting.
The only
measure executives reportedly addressed was that they might consider hiring for
a civil rights position at the company, but they were unable to commit to
putting that employee at a high level or in the C-suite.
“‘Almost’
isn’t good enough when we are talking about fighting hate,” said Jonathan
Greenblatt, the chief executive officer of the Anti-Defamation League, which is
part of the coalition. “Facebook should have a zero-tolerance policy on
intolerance like every other company in America.”
Facebook is
“grateful to these groups and many others for their continued engagement”, a
spokeswoman said on Tuesday, citing a civil rights audit the company is
releasing on Wednesday as a gesture of its move towards more transparency. She
also noted the company had banned more than 250 white supremacist organizations
and created new policies to prohibit voter and census interference.
“This
meeting was an opportunity for us to hear from the campaign organizers and
reaffirm our commitment to combating hate on our platform,” she 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.”
Facebook
claims it removes 89% of hate content on its own before anyone reports it, but
the groups behind the boycott say those numbers are difficult to understand
without context. Stop Hate for Profit demands the company submit to third-party
audits because “a transparency report is only as good as its author is
independent”, according to its site. Activists also say any amount of hate
speech is too much.
“Starbucks
can’t say 89% of its coffee doesn’t have poison in it, Ford Motor Company
cannot say 89% of its fleet has seatbelts that work and still sell them – most
companies recall a product that is not at 99.9%,” Greenblatt said. “Maybe it’s
time that we recall Facebook groups, maybe it’s time that we recall the
newsfeed, maybe it’s time they get involved and take decisive, deliberate
action to stamp out hate. They could do it today.”
Zuckerberg
has reportedly expressed that he believes the advertisers will soon be back
regardless of what changes Facebook makes. Facebook reportedly gets the
majority of its advertising from small businesses, and major companies make up
only 20% of its revenue. But organizers say the boycott, which will last at
least through the month of July, is poised to extend into Europe.
“The fact
of the matter is that this campaign will continue to grow, it will get more
global, it will get more intense, until we get the answers we are looking for,”
Greenblatt said.
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