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Facebook on Ad Boycotts: “Facebook Does Not Profit from Hate”
Nick Clegg, Facebook Vice President of Global Affairs, has published an open letter saying that Facebook “does not profit from hate.”
This follows the act of major companies announcing that they would pull ads from Facebook and Instagram. The companies that joined this movement are doing it to boycott hate speech. Some of these companies include Coca-Cola, Ford, Microsoft, and Lego.
“I want to be unambiguous: Facebook does not profit from hate. Billions of people use Facebook and Instagram because they have good experiences — they don't want to see hateful content, our advertisers don't want to see it, and we don't want to see it. There is no incentive for us to do anything but remove it,” Clegg wrote.
He added that “everything that is good, bad and ugly in our societies will find expression on our platform.”
Activist groups urge companies to pull ads from the platform as part of their #StopHateForProfit campaign. They allege that Facebook turns a “blind eye to voter suppression.”
The Website's Stance
Facebook Does Not Benefit from Hate https://t.co/r4944FxvD7
— Meta Newsroom (@MetaNewsroom) July 1, 2020
However, Clegg argued that the platform removes hate speech faster than YouTube and Twitter.
“A recent European Commission report found that Facebook assessed 95.7 [percent] of hate speech reports in less than 24 hours, faster than YouTube and Twitter. Last month, we reported that we find nearly 90 [percent] of the hate speech we remove before someone reports it — up from 24 [percent] little over two years ago,” Clegg wrote.
Mark Zuckerberg has been criticized for promoting the idea of free speech and not acting against Trump’s posts.
“I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. In general, private companies probably shouldn't be – especially these platform companies – shouldn't be in the position of doing that,” he said in a May 27th interview.
The company has since updated its policies, saying in a recent blog post that they will begin labeling content it previously would not have flagged if they were deemed “newsworthy.”
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