Facebook faces boycott push from NAACP, ADL, and other civil rights groups

Facebook let hateful messages spread for years. Now civil rights groups want to drain the company’s ad revenue.

The Wall Street Journal reported that major civil rights organizations, including the NAACP and Anti-Defamation League, have launched an effort to convince big brands to stop giving ad money to Facebook for the month of July. The boycott plan was revealed in an ad in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times, which makes the motivations plainly clear:

“They allowed incitement to violence against protestors fighting for racial justice in America in the wake of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and so many others. They amplified white nationalists by including news sources with known extremist ties into their ‘fact checking’ program. They turned a blind eye to blatant voter suppression in their platform.”

The ad goes on to further accuse Facebook of not using its massive platform responsibly, including its refusal to categorize Holocaust denial as hate speech. As such, the new effort calls for advertisers to stop giving their money to Facebook to call attention to the issue. Google faced a similar boycott over its lax moderation of YouTube content in 2017.

Facebook has faced intense scrutiny over its algorithms and ad policies since the 2016 presidential election. But people have been ratcheting up the pressure in recent weeks. CEO Mark Zuckerberg infamously defended Donald Trump’s right to post threats against protesters after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. Trump’s presumptive opponent in November, Joe Biden, published an open letter advocating for change in Facebook’s moderation policies.

At the time of writing, no major companies had publicly agreed to boycott Facebook as part of the new campaign yet. Digital advertising is the biggest pillar in Facebook’s business plan, so that might be the only way to force change from the outside.