Facebook Advertiser Boycott Over Hate Speech Needs to Go Viral
The leading social media platform is getting significant blowback via a coalition (Stop Hate for Profit) that has successfully organized an advertiser boycott of Facebook. More than 400 companies have joined the campaign, including Verizon, Target, HP, Unilever and other global brands.
The campaign began as an effort by U.S. civil rights groups including the Anti-Defamation League, NAACP and Color of Change following the death of George Floyd, the Black man who died under the knee of a Minneapolis white police officer.
They have listed 10 demands for Facebook including allowing people who experience severe harassment to speak with a Facebook employee and giving refunds to brands whose ads show up next to offensive content that is later removed.
From the New York Times:
“Other companies are seeing this moment, and are stepping up proactively,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, citing recent efforts from Reddit, YouTube and Twitch taking down posts and content that promote hate speech across their sites. “If they can do it, and all of Facebook’s advertisers are asking them to do it, it doesn’t seem that hard to do.”
The push from advertisers has led Facebook’s business to a precarious point. While the social network has struggled with issues such as election interference and privacy in recent years, its juggernaut digital ads business has always powered forward. The Silicon Valley company has never faced a public backlash of this magnitude from its advertisers, whose spending accounts for more than 98 percent of its annual $70.7 billion in revenue.
“Their intentions are good, but their judgment is poor,” David Jones, a top advertising executive, said of Facebook. Mr. Jones, who was a founding member of Facebook’s client council, a group of ad executives who advise the company, said if the social network did not make further progress on hate speech, then “they’re starting down a long slippery slope to being irrelevant.”
Hiding behind the guise of free speech advocacy, Facebook has acted as a safe haven for hate groups and targeted harassment.
Data coming out of a joint survey from the Anti-Defamation League and YouGov says that, of those who said they’ve been harassed online in the past year, 77% of respondents said it happened at least once on Facebook. That’s a 21-point increase from 2019, and is miles ahead of the second-most cited platform for harassment, Twitter, which registered 27%.
Significant points in the survey included:
44% percent of all Americans said they’ve experienced online harassment over the past year.
55% percent of respondents who said they’d been harassed said it was in part due to their political views
35% said it was due to their physical appearance – up from 21 percent in 2019.
LGBTQ+ individuals reported the highest level of harassment at 65% in 2020.
Yesterday, the company announced the removal of hundreds of accounts and groups associated with a violent network of the far-right “boogaloo” movement whose followers have been linked to violence that disrupted mostly peaceful protests around the United States.
The social media giant has launched a public relations blitz to contain the damage, headed by Nick Clegg, the former Deputy Prime Minister of the UK and current Vice President for Global Affairs and Communications at Facebook.
Clegg's appearances on CNN, MSNBC, and Bloomberg have only underscored the point that Facebook is still in denial. The company is not willing to acknowledge the scope of its problems or make a good faith effort to address them.
Judd Legum’s Popular Information newsletter has revealed the extent of the company’s complicity with promoting far right viewpoints way out of proportion to their consumption in society at large.
Ten or more times each day, a network of five large Facebook pages controlled by Mad World News publishes the same link to The Daily Wire. Although this appears to violate Facebook's prohibition on undisclosed sponsored content and coordinated inauthentic behavior, Facebook has refused to take action. This has made The Daily Wire — a cesspool of misogyny, bigotry, and misinformation — to outperform every other major publisher on Facebook.
Apart from The Daily Wire's underhanded tactics, Facebook's algorithm favors divisive content. An internal Facebook report from 2018 found that Facebook's "algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness." Unless changes were made, users would post "more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform,” the report concluded. Facebook declined to take steps to meaningfully change the algorithm because "some proposed changes would have disproportionately affected conservative users and publishers."
In society at large, The Daily Wire is not a more successful publication than the New York Times or the Washington Post. But Facebook has constructed an alternate reality where divisive content dominates.
https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1276597627623100416?s=20
While Facebook likes to make grandiose claims about its network of fact checkers, earlier this year Legum revealed its budget for the “60 fact-checkers in over 50 languages” amounts to 0.003% of its annual revenue.
Journalist Brooke Binkowski was a primary source for a Guardian article in December, 2018 revealing just how the verification program is little more than a PR effort by the company to look good. And, based on more recent observations, not much has changed.
Popular Information reported last week that Facebook, at the behest of climate science deniers, overruled a "false" rating on a Washington Examiner column, which claimed climate models were inaccurate. In so doing, Facebook overruled five Ph.D. climate scientists who determined the piece was false.
Today, a group of over a dozen well-known environmental leaders called on Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt as a member of Facebook’s Oversight Board to close a loophole allowing climate science deniers propaganda to appear labeled as opinion.
Facebook is allowing the spread of climate misinformation to flourish, unchecked, across the globe. Instead of heeding the advice of independent scientists and approved fact-checkers from Climate Feedback, Facebook sided with fossil fuel lobbyists by allowing the CO2 Coalition to take advantage of a giant loophole for “opinion” content. The loophole has allowed climate denial to fester by labeling it “opinion,” and thus, avoiding the platform’s fact-checking processes.
Facebook knows how to take action against misinformation. When COVID-19 denial took hold on the platform, it was forcibly shut down because Facebook understood that the spread of COVID-19 misinformation could cause imminent physical harm to the health and well-being of Facebook users. Climate denial and misinformation are also deadly. By allowing climate misinformation to go unchecked, Facebook is actively putting the health and well-being of our nation’s most vulnerable low-income communities and communities of color at risk.
On Monday, Facebook announced it had hired Media Rating Council (MRC), a media measurement firm, to conduct an audit to evaluate how it protects advertisers from appearing next to harmful content and the accuracy of the company’s reporting in certain areas.
To be clear, the campaign aimed at Facebook is not about suppressing points of view based on their ideological content. It’s about hate speech, misinformation, and the company’s blind eye to the use of its platform by domestic and international bad actors.
Despite their frequent claims of bias, the administration and its allies have successfully “worked the refs” at Facebook in recent years, as reported in the Washington Post:
Facebook has constrained its efforts against false and misleading news, adopted a policy explicitly allowing politicians to lie, and even altered its news feed algorithm to neutralize claims that it was biased against conservative publishers, according to more than a dozen former and current employees and previously unreported documents obtained by The Washington Post. One of the documents shows it began as far back as 2015, when as a candidate Trump posted a video calling for a ban of Muslims entering the United States. Facebook’s executives declined to remove it, setting in motion an exception for political discourse.
The concessions to Trump have led to a transformation of the world’s information battlefield. They paved the way for a growing list of digitally savvy politicians to repeatedly push out misinformation and incendiary political language to billions of people. It has complicated the public understanding of major events such as the pandemic and the protest movement, as well as contributed to polarization.
And as Trump grew in power, the fear of his wrath pushed Facebook into more deferential behavior toward its growing number of right-leaning users, tilting the balance of news people see on the network, according to the current and former employees.
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There are going to be people who respond to this posting by suggesting that everybody should just close down their Facebook pages.
I always respond to such demands by pointing out the value of social media. It connects people in ways that push back against the forces in this society that alienate us from each other. And until I see an alternative, I’m going to stay on Facebook.
As the company is eager to point out, good things do happen on its platform. I’m sure their upcoming voter registration campaign will get some results. I want to see people’s ideas, photos, and read about life experiences. And if it ain’t interesting, I can just keep scrolling.
They have a responsibility to see that their content won’t encourage people to do bad things, and they should acknowledge that obligation. What’s good and what’s bad does change over time, so it’s important to pay attention. And if there is any entity in the world capable of listening, it ought to be Facebook.
For now, I’d suggest a “What would Mr Rogers do?” as an easily attainable standard for what the company pushes into people’s feeds. Allowing people to determine their own boundaries for social acceptability is another achievable objective, with some privacy protections in place.
I’ve tried out the various other FB replacements and found them wanting, sort of like the sound of one hand clapping. The platform fills a need to be recognized that is no longer possible in a world where people have been induced to fear each other so much that neighbors don’t even speak to each other.
Now that I’m COVID isolated, Facebook is a window to a world populated by friends going back five decades, family, and some people who are just doing interesting things.
Having said all that, I’ve learned an important lesson from my Facebook engagements: don’t give them your money.
Back in my days with the San Diego Free Press we regularly “boosted” posts. And then Facebook shut us down until I could prove we weren’t Russians by instituting a policy concerning “political” content.
The thing that Facebook should fear the most is that the advertiser boycott will inform sponsors of the platform’s true worth as a business booster. Unique content --a rare event these days-- will get traffic; the rest of the money spent on Facebook isn’t particularly effective.
https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1278375366978134017?s=20
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Lead image by Gerd Altmann @ Pixabay