Several social media companies, and especially Facebook, have long been criticized for not doing enough to stop hate speech on-line.  Now a group of civil rights organizations including The Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Sleeping Giants, Colors of Change, Free Press and Common Sense is trying to change that. They have requested that businesses “hit pause on hate” and not advertise on Facebook during the month of July as part of their “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign.  According to the group’s website, their message to Facebook advertisers is, “”Let’s send Facebook a powerful message: Your profits will never be worth promoting hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and violence.”  

It is almost certainly no coincidence that this call comes as a certain political campaign and its surrogates have increased the money they pay Facebook to run ads which use despicable tactics to rally supporters.  Facebook has had a mostly hands-off approach to posts by Donald Trump that could incite violence.  In addition, with the spread of the pandemic and the protests following the death of George Floyd, totally unfounded conspiracy theories, outright lies and misinformation multiplied on social media, especially in Facebook groups supporting Trump. Facebook has also been used to incite violence against protesters and to suppress voting. 

So far 400 companies have joined the boycott and pulled their ads from Facebook for at least the month of July, while others have committed to discontinuing their ads until Facebook installs major reforms.  This group includes some of Facebook’s biggest customers, Ford, North Face Denny’s, Coca-Cola, Volkswagen, Microsoft, North Face, Clorox, Adidas, Hershey, Ford, Verizon, Starbucks, Target, Mars Inc. (Snickers, M&Ms, etc.) and consumer goods giant Unilever.  When Facebook’s stock plunged 8% last Friday (6/24) as a result of the boycott and wiped out $56 billion from Facebook’s market value it seem to get Mark Zuckerberg’s attention. 

However, while Zuckerberg says that Facebook will do more to deal with hate speech and lies in political ads, the additional measures he has mentioned are not the least bit impressive to most observers. For instance, the title of Andrew Marantz’s column on the subject in the New Yorker is entitled, “Mark Zuckerberg Still Doesn’t Get It”.  More importantly, the civil rights groups sponsoring the boycott are saying that the new measures don’t go nearly far enough.  Zuckerberg didn’t even seem particularly concerned Monday when many of Facebook employees, including some of the company’s high level managers,  walked away from their desks and started tweeting accusations that he was failing to police Trump’s posts as strictly as Twitter has done.

Behind the scenes Zuckerberg has been more open with Facebook employees about his intentions going forward.  According to a MarketWatch article entitled, Zuckerberg Said to Say about Facebook Boycott, ‘All of these Advertisers Will Be Back Soon Enough’:  “Zuckerberg said the boycott is more of a PR issue than one that will hurt the social-media giant’s bottom line, according to a report which cited a transcript of remarks Zuckerberg gave at an employees-only virtual town hall Friday. ‘We’re not gonna change our policies or approach on anything because of a threat to a small percent of our revenue, or to any percent of our revenue,”  

Why is Zuckerberg not overly impressed with the boycott and the walkout?  Probably because while the list of boycotting companies is very impressive, the 100 brands that spend the most money advertising on Facebook only account for 6% of the social media giant’s yearly revenue and many of those companies have not joined the boycott.  Some like Coca-Cola are only committed to not advertising on Facebook during the month of July.  The vast majority of Facebook’s advertising revenue comes from thousands upon thousands of small to medium size business and political campaigns. Evidently investors have figured all of this out because as of this writing Facebook has recovered all of its earlier stock market losses.

Here is what you can do:

1. Ask the large companies already involved to continue their boycott of Facebook advertising until Facebook takes decisive action to rid their platform of hateful speech and political lies.
2. If you encounter advertisements on Facebook from companies not yet committed to the boycott, as a potential customer let them know that they must also join the boycott or you won’t buy their products and services.  (Facebook shows ads to its subscribers who are most likely to buy those particular products and services, so your feedback to those companies whose ads you encounter on Facebook will be particularly meaningful.) 

This article provides an incomplete list of companies participating in the advertising boycott; more are being added every day:  Facebook Boycott: View the List of Companies Pulling Ads

While Zuckerberg owns about 29% of Facebook’s shares, his holdings also give him 57.9% of the total voting shares, giving him effective control of the company.  Therefore, he generally does whatever he wants with Facebook regardless of what anyone else thinks.  The only thing that will really get his attention is if his company’s revenues drop dramatically and  98.5% of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising.  It is time for all of us to get involved.

Cajun    7/2/2020