Exclusive: Facebook ad boycott campaign to go global, organizers say

[webfact]

Exclusive: Facebook ad boycott campaign to go global, organizers say

By Sheila Dang

 

FILE PHOTO: A 3D-printed Facebook logo is seen placed on a keyboard in this illustration taken March 25, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

 

(Reuters) - Organizers of a Facebook Inc <FB.O> advertising boycott campaign that has drawn support from a rapidly expanding list of major companies are now preparing to take the battle global to increase pressure on the social media company to remove hate speech.

 

The "Stop Hate for Profit" campaign will begin calling on major companies in Europe to join the boycott, Jim Steyer, chief executive of Common Sense Media, said in an interview with Reuters on Saturday. Since the campaign launched earlier this month, more than 160 companies, including Verizon Communications <VZ.N> and Unilever Plc <ULVR.L>, have signed on to stop buying ads on the world’s largest social media platform for the month of July.

 

Free Press and Common Sense, along with U.S. civil rights groups Color of Change and the Anti-Defamation League, launched the campaign following the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man killed by Minneapolis police.

 

"The next frontier is global pressure," Steyer said, adding the campaign hopes to embolden regulators in Europe to take a harder stance on Facebook. The European Commission in June announced new guidelines for tech companies including Facebook to submit monthly reports on how they are handling coronavirus misinformation.

 

The outrage in the United States over the death of Floyd has led to an unprecedented reaction from corporations around the world. Its impact has been felt beyond U.S. borders. Unilever, for example, changed the name of a skin-lightening product popular in India called Fair and Lovely.

 

The global campaign will proceed as organizers continue to urge more U.S. companies to participate. Jessica Gonzalez, co-chief executive of Free Press, said she has contacted major U.S. telecommunications and media companies to ask them to join the campaign.

 

Responding to demands for more action, Facebook on Sunday acknowledged it has more work to do and is teaming up with civil rights groups and experts to develop more tools to fight hate speech. Facebook said its investments in artificial intelligence have allowed it to find 90% of hate speech before users report it.

 

Expanding the campaign outside the United States will take a bigger slice off of Facebook’s advertising revenue but is not likely have major financial impact. Unilever, for instance, on Friday committed to pausing its U.S. spending on Facebook for the rest of the year. That only accounts for about 10% of its overall estimated $250 million it spends on Facebook advertising annually, according to Richard Greenfield of LightShed Partners, a media and tech research firm.

 

Steyer said they will urge global advertisers such as Unilever and Honda, which have only committed to pausing U.S. ads, to pull their Facebook ads globally.

 

Annually, Facebook generates $70 billion in advertising sales and about a quarter of it comes from big companies such as Unilever with the vast majority of its revenue derived from small businesses.

 

But the publicity around its hate speech policies have hurt its perception and stock. On Friday, Facebook's 8.3% decline in stock price wiped out $56 billion in market capitalization.

 

The renewed push to urge more companies outside of the United States to join demonstrates the level of frustration felt by social justice groups and the companies that support them over Facebook’s lack of action on misinformation and hate speech, Steyer said.

 

He and Gonzalez said Facebook’s efforts on Friday to introduce new measures to ban ads and label hate speech from politicians to appease boycotters fell short of the campaign’s demands.

 

“If they think they are done based on Friday, they are sorely mistaken,” Gonzalez said. “We don't need a one-off policy here and there. We need comprehensive policy.”

 

Stop Hate for Profit has outlined a set of demands, which include a separate moderation process to help users who are targeted by race and other identifiers, more transparency on how many incidents of hate speech are reported and to stop generating ad revenue from harmful content.

 

Moreover, Facebook did not address demands that it refund companies whose ads are displayed next to content that is later removed for policy violations, said Ian Orekondy, chief executive of AdComplyRx, an advertising tech company that helps pharmaceutical brands with their digital ads, which has joined the boycott.

 

The boycott has accelerated to include other digital advertising platforms such as Twitter. Starbucks said Sunday it would pause advertising on all social media platforms while it works with civil rights organizations to "stop the spread of hate speech."

 

(Reporting by Sheila Dang; editing by Kenneth Li and Lisa Shumaker)

 

-- © Copyright Reuters 2020-06-30

 

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[ezzra]

So much power in the hands of one dorky looking guy with his signature gray Tshirt and his dumb and dumber haircut who keeps claiming that FB is just the messenger and has no powers to influence hearts and minds...

[Tug]

Good hold his feet to the fire and make his company responsible for what it does!

[Deli]

Billions burnt coz a cop did his job.

World has become outta mind.

[Nigel Garvie]

2 hours ago, Deli said:

Billions burnt coz a cop did his job.

World has become outta mind.

Which cop, what job?

 

[Benmart]

15 hours ago, ezzra said:

So much power in the hands of one dorky looking guy with his signature gray Tshirt and his dumb and dumber haircut who keeps claiming that FB is just the messenger and has no powers to influence hearts and minds...

A typical tactic of an ill-prepared debate is to attack a persons appearance. The "power" of any entity is determined by the masses who support or remove such support. My heart and mind is not controlled by FB, the "news" or the posts on TVF. 

 

In the case of FB, the "news" and other media, who shall determine what is allowed, what is to be muzzled or banned, and to what standard?

 

Seems this forum could disappear at the hands of the self-elected censors.

[volsfan]

4 hours ago, Benmart said:

A typical tactic of an ill-prepared debate is to attack a persons appearance. The "power" of any entity is determined by the masses who support or remove such support. My heart and mind is not controlled by FB, the "news" or the posts on TVF. 

 

In the case of FB, the "news" and other media, who shall determine what is allowed, what is to be muzzled or banned, and to what standard?

 

Seems this forum could disappear at the hands of the self-elected censors.

Nope. This forum, with it's anti-American and anti-trump leanings, fits into the encouraged class. Liberal speech is good, Conservative speech is bad. That is all you need to understand. 

 

[Meat Pie 47]

19 hours ago, ezzra said:

So much power in the hands of one dorky looking guy with his signature gray Tshirt and his dumb and dumber haircut who keeps claiming that FB is just the messenger and has no powers to influence hearts and minds...

Are you jealous what have you achieved apart from posting on TV ? 

[impulse]

12 hours ago, Deli said:

Billions burnt coz a cop did his job.

World has become outta mind.

 

If you think it's about one cop and one incident, you don't get it. 

 

That may have been the match that lit the fuse.  But the powderkeg has been building for decades.

 

[torturedsole]

4 hours ago, Benmart said:

In the case of FB, the "news" and other media, who shall determine what is allowed, what is to be muzzled or banned, and to what standard?

The subscribers will determine whether there's a Facebook worth subscribing to once every word has been sanitised to death then what are the corporates going to do?  I'll tell you what they'll do, they'll change their tune once they realise the majority of FB subscribers have moved to another, more conservative, social media platform.

[Chomper Higgot]

2 hours ago, torturedsole said:

The subscribers will determine whether there's a Facebook worth subscribing to once every word has been sanitised to death then what are the corporates going to do?  I'll tell you what they'll do, they'll change their tune once they realise the majority of FB subscribers have moved to another, more conservative, social media platform.

They’ll need to take the advertising revinue with them.

 

Oh wait....

[OZinPattaya]

The answer to the social-media oligarchs is very simple--remove their protected status as utilities. Open them up to endless class-action civil litigation or they remove the political bias from their venues. If I were Trump, my last hurrah in the oval office would be to plow legislation at the executive level in order to BF the tech billionaires, oligarchs and monopolists.

[Chomper Higgot]

4 minutes ago, OZinPattaya said:

The answer to the social-media oligarchs is very simple--remove their protected status as utilities. Open them up to endless class-action civil litigation or they remove the political bias from their venues. If I were Trump, my last hurrah in the oval office would be to plow legislation at the executive level in order to BF the tech billionaires, oligarchs and monopolists.

Well, that would fit with the rightwing totalitarianism the Left often accuse Trump and his supporters of.

 

 

[OZinPattaya]

2 hours ago, Chomper Higgot said:

Well, that would fit with the rightwing totalitarianism the Left often accuse Trump and his supporters of.

 

 

The right-wing totalitarianism? Last time I checked it wasn't the right-wing trying to legislate speech laws. And the media giants do have a choice. They can either have full protection as, say, cellular companies have, or they can stop censoring content. AT&T doesn't disconnect your call, or cancel your service, because you "violated" their terms of service by "misgendering" a person. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, can't have it both ways.

[Nigel Garvie]

20 minutes ago, OZinPattaya said:

The right-wing totalitarianism? Last time I checked it wasn't the right-wing trying to legislate speech laws. And the media giants do have a choice. They can either have full protection as, say, cellular companies have, or they can stop censoring content. AT&T doesn't disconnect your call, or cancel your service, because you "violated" their terms of service by "misgendering" a person. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, can't have it both ways.

Modest controls, but no litigation lunacy, is that common sense approach possible in the US? As I said in the last FB thread it is about hate speech, WHEREVER it comes from. People are just getting tired of hate I think, and the advertisers have become aware of that. Any data scientist worth his salt could write a few algorithms to pick this stuff up, Face Book didn't do it because they thought it would limit their income stream.

[OZinPattaya]

33 minutes ago, Nigel Garvie said:

Modest controls, but no litigation lunacy, is that common sense approach possible in the US? As I said in the last FB thread it is about hate speech, WHEREVER it comes from. People are just getting tired of hate I think, and the advertisers have become aware of that. Any data scientist worth his salt could write a few algorithms to pick this stuff up, Face Book didn't do it because they thought it would limit their income stream.

It hasn't been possible in the UK or Sweden, both of which have legislated speech laws, and imprisoned violators, so why should it be in the US? Try turning a concept like "hate" into something scientific, such that an unbiased algorithm could possibly detect. Not possible. The very notion is conceptually ludicrous. And advertisers don't care about social justice, or hate--give me a break--, they only care about profit, which is why they have all jumped upon the BLM bandwagon.

Edited July 1, 2020 by OZinPattaya

[spidermike007]

21 hours ago, Deli said:

Billions burnt coz a cop did his job.

World has become outta mind.

Undoubtedly the most mindless, thoughtless, hostile, ignorant, hateful and inane statement of the day. 

[spidermike007]

This is all good. The world is becoming more conscious, and FB is paying the price. They must monitor their site more closely. They are being penalized for their utter lack of concern and diligence. 

[welovesundaysatspace]

 

3 hours ago, OZinPattaya said:

Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, can't have it both ways.

Of course they can. And corporates can decide to pull ads from platforms where content is posted they don’t want their brands to be associated with. Same as they did some years ago when YouTube didn’t act on pedophiles posting videos of kids in underwear on YouTube. That didn’t violate any laws in the US I understand, but it was removed (I hope). The kiddy fiddlers now use the dark web, and maybe that’s where the alt-right finds a new home as well. Whether you’re a pedophile or a neo-nazi, no one has to give you their platform for your disgusting <deleted>. 

[Nigel Garvie]

2 hours ago, OZinPattaya said:

  2 hours ago, Nigel Garvie said:

Modest controls, but no litigation lunacy, is that common sense approach possible in the US? As I said in the last FB thread it is about hate speech, WHEREVER it comes from. People are just getting tired of hate I think, and the advertisers have become aware of that. Any data scientist worth his salt could write a few algorithms to pick this stuff up, Face Book didn't do it because they thought it would limit their income stream.

2 hours ago, OZinPattaya said:

It hasn't been possible in the UK or Sweden, both of which have legislated speech laws, and imprisoned violators, so why should it be in the US? Try turning a concept like "hate" into something scientific, such that an unbiased algorithm could possibly detect. Not possible. The very notion is conceptually ludicrous. And advertisers don't care about social justice, or hate--give me a break--, they only care about profit, which is why they have all jumped upon the BLM bandwagon.

"Try turning a concept like "hate" into something scientific, such that an unbiased algorithm could possibly detect".......No...... what I said was that algorithms can pick this stuff up. It then requires a human to further investigate, I imagined that was understood. My son is a Data scientist, he informs me that they really can be pretty sophisticated nowadays, but naturally they have their limitations.

 

And advertisers don't care about social justice, or hate, they only care about profit,..................Wow, I'm stunned!............but again no, that is not what I said, what I said was that advertisers have picked up that a significant enough number of their customers care about certain things, that translates into money for them.

 

--give me a break-- of course........have a Kit Kat