Lululemon, Coca-Cola, and more sign on to Facebook ad boycott to combat hate speech

Jun 29 2020, 11:20 pm

A new online campaign is taking aim at one of the biggest names in tech — and advertising.

Stop Hate for Profit is signing up businesses to halt their advertising on Facebook for one month until the company does more to address hate speech on its platform.

“We asked companies to act against hate and disinformation being spread by Facebook in our campaign,” the group writes on its website. “We asked businesses to temporarily pause advertising on Facebook and Instagram in order to force Mark Zuckerberg to address the effect that Facebook has had on our society.”

The campaign began on June 17 but has already been picking up steam, as some big names in all manner of businesses have signed on board, including Mountain Equipment Coop (MEC), Lululemon, Coca-Cola, Patagonia, Arc’teryx, and more. At time of writing, 93 different companies are listed as participating on the group’s website.

“We reject hate and extremism and have pulled our organic content and paid ads from Facebook and Instagram until the end of July,” a representative from MEC told Daily Hive in a statement. “Please join us in raising awareness of the harmful, racist content and misinformation that is shared on these social platforms. We ask that Facebook strengthen their content-moderation policies and enforce them consistently.”

Stop Hate for Profit acknowledges that much of the platform’s issues cannot be solved in a month, but have a list of first steps they say the company can make in good faith to start addressing the issue. Currently, the 10 demands focus on accountability, decency, and support.

These include measures to automatically flag hateful content in private groups for human review, submit to third-party, independent audits of identity-based hate and misinformation with results available publicly, and providing an audit and refund to advertisers whose ads were shown next to content that was later removed for violations of terms of service, among others.

Stop Hate for Profit is also calling on users to do their part, by urging the social media giant to make changes to its terms of service that would better address the issue and for businesses to “hit pause” on all advertising spending on Facebook for the month of July.

“We invest billions of dollars each year to keep our community safe and continuously work with outside experts to review and update our policies. We’ve opened ourselves up to a civil rights audit, and we have banned 250 white supremacist organizations from Facebook and Instagram,” a Facebook spokesperson told Daily Hive in a statement. “The investments we have made in AI mean that we find nearly 90% of Hate Speech we action before users report it to us, while a recent EU report found Facebook assessed more hate speech reports in 24 hours than Twitter and YouTube.”

Zuckerburg also posted to Facebook last week, addressing updates to the company’s policy that they believe will directly impact hate on the platform.

“We know we have more work to do, and we’ll continue to work with civil rights groups, GARM, and other experts to develop even more tools, technology and policies to continue this fight.”

Facebook does have anti-hate policies, and several prominent organizations and groups have been removed from the platform in response to public pressure in the past. Notably, in 2019 the company began banning white nationalists, including groups like Faith Goldie and the European-Identitarian offshoot, ID Canada, among others.

Stop Hate for Profit was started by the Anti-Defamation League, a not for profit that was started in 1913 as a response to a rise in antisemitism and hate against the Jewish community. It is now one of the largest anti-hate organizations in the continent and regularly focuses on combating this type of speech online.

Peter SmithPeter Smith

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