A growing list of companies have joined the Stop Hate for Profit campaign by vowing to pause their ads on Facebook for the month of July
Major multinational companies including Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Verizon and Unilever have joined forces to boycott Facebook ads, saying the company doesn’t do enough to remove hate speech.
A growing list of companies have joined the Stop Hate for Profit campaign by vowing to pause their ads on Facebook for the month of July. More than 160 companies have pulled their spending so far.
The Stop Hate for Profit campaign was launched by organisations Free Press and Common Sense, along with US civil rights groups Color of Change, Anti-Defamation League and NAACP after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
Among its goals is to put public and financial pressure on Facebook to stop generating ad revenue from hateful content.
The campaign says it’s taking action against “Facebook’s long history of allowing racist, violent and verifiably false content to run rampant on its platform”. Stop Hate for Profit has drawn support from a fast-growing list of major US companies. Organisers are now preparing to take the campaign global.
Some of the companies will only pause ads just on Facebook, while others will pause their advertising more broadly on social media.
On Friday, Facebook’s market value dropped by more than 8 per cent, amounting to about $72 billion.
To give some context, last year Facebook generated nearly $102 billion in advertising sales.
About a quarter of that comes from big companies such as Unilever, but the vast majority comes from small businesses.
And while Unilever committed to pause its US spending on Facebook for the rest of the year, that only accounts for about 10 per cent of its overall estimated $250 million it spends on Facebook advertising annually, according to Richard Greenfield from media and tech research firm LightShed Partners.
Another key consideration is that as more companies pause their spending, some have pointed out that the platform’s biggest spenders haven’t budged.
On Friday, just hours after Unilever said it would pull its ads, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company would begin labelling newsworthy content that violates its policies in the lead-up to November’s US elections.
He also said it would label all posts and advertisements about voting with links to accurate information.
On Sunday, the company acknowledged it had more work to do, saying it was teaming up with civil rights groups and experts to develop more tools to fight hate speech.
But it said its investments in artificial intelligence have allowed it to find 90 per cent of hate speech before users report it.
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