More companies join the Facebook ad boycott concerning the misinformation and hate speech on the platform.
Coca-Cola, Unilever, PepsiCo, Diageo, Starbucks, and The Hershey Company have joined the Facebook ad boycott that was organized by the ‘Stop Hate for Profit’ campaign group as reported by foodbev.com. as of 29th June, approximately 160 companies have announced they will no more buy ad space on the Facebook platform starting from the month of July.
This very campaign was launched by Free Press and Common Sense, along with US civil rights group Color of Change and Anti-Defamation league, following the death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The global protest against systematic racism aims to ensure that the social network implements stricter measures to combat alleged ‘hateful and racist’ content on its platforms.
Unilever stated that it is halting all Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter advertising in the US “at least” throughout 2020. “Continuing to advertise on these platforms at this time would not add value to people and society. “We will revisit our current position if necessary”, said the company.
On Friday Coca-Cola announced that it will be pausing advertising on all social media platforms globally for at least 30 days. James Quincey the SEO of Coca-Cola stated; “There is no place for racism in the world and there is no place for racism on social media,” adding that Coca-Cola will now reassess its advertising policies to determine whether this will be extended further.
While Coca-Cola has made a public announcement, PepsiCo on the other hand has not oun[blicly backed the campaign, but many sources have it that the company told Fox Business that the firm had launched a global boycott which would run through July and August.
In a speech which was given by the CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg on Friday clearly shows that he is defending the firm’s record of removing hate speech on the platform and made it clear that Facebook would now start to label potentially harmful posts that it leaves up ‘because of their news value’.
He said: “A handful of times a year, we leave up content that would otherwise violate our policies if the public interest value outweighs the risk of harm.
“Often, seeing speech from politicians is in the public interest, and in the same way that news outlets will report what a politician says, we think people should generally be able to see it for themselves on our platforms.
“We will soon start labeling some of the content we leave up because it is deemed newsworthy, so people can know when this is the case.”
Meanwhile, Stop Hate for Profit claimed that measures were not sufficiently taken as it supposed to and have called on the social network to introduce a moderation process to help users who are targeted by race and other identifiers and to provide more transparency regarding how many incidents of hate speech are reported by users.
Why Companies Are Joining The Facebook Ad Boycott
It’s too early to tell how the Facebook ad boycott movement will affect Facebook, which is facing its biggest crisis since the Cambridge Analytica scandal invited scrutiny of the social network’s effect on elections and resulted in a record $5 billion fine. Facebook has a diverse revenue base among 8 million advertisers worldwide, though many smaller businesses have faced serious threats from the coronavirus pandemic and resulting lockdowns added with the Facebook ad boycott.
Many companies joined the Facebook ad boycott to show that they are not in support of any kind of racist behavior and the will never be in any kind of support of it. Facebook being the largest social media platform is the hub of this protest, which implies that Facebook ought to be in support of the Hate Speech Campaign which seems the ara not. These big companies are trying to tell the world and Facebook to be in support of it for the betterment of the world.
We hope and pray that facebook recovers from the Facebook ad boycott due to over 7 billion dollars have been lost by the company because of these decisions taking by the world big companies.