The Facebook ad boycott kicks off today as more than 240 companies, representing over 400 brands, “hit pause on hate.” Launched last month by a group of civil rights organizations, the #StopHateForProfit campaign encourages businesses to halt advertising during July 2020 in solidarity with “American values of freedom, equality, and justice.”
Day-one participants include Adidas, Ben & Jerry’s, Coca-Cola, Dashlane, Honda, Levi’s, Mozilla, Patreon, REI, Target, The North Face, and Verizon, among hundreds of other global, national, and local brands. Don’t expect pop-ups for Best Buy laptops, DeVry University degrees, or Herschel Supply Co. backpacks; enjoy a month free of lululemon hype and Denny’s promotions.
“The campaign is a response to Facebook’s long history of allowing racist, violent, and verifiably false content to run rampant on its platform,” the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said in a June press release. ADL partnered with the NAACP, Sleeping Giants, Color of Change, Free Press, and Common Sense to call for change. Specifically, a change in what Facebook does with its $70 billion annual revenue—99 percent of which comes from advertising, according to the initiative, which claims the social network “turned a blind eye to blatant voter suppression on their platform.” Facebook, meanwhile, contented last year that its top 100 advertisers accounted for less than 20 percent of total ad revenue, Reuters reported.
“The campaign will organize corporate and public pressure,” ADL said, “to demand Facebook stop generating ad revenue from hateful content, provide more support to people who are targets of racism and hate, and to increase safety for private groups on the platform, among other measures.”
Some firms are going the extra mile: Major consumer goods company Unilever promised to suspend all US-targeted advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter through the end of the year. “We acknowledge the efforts of our partners, but there is much more to be done,” the corporation, which owns 400-plus brands (including Breyers, Comfort, Dove, Hellmann’s, and Lipton), said in a statement.
Starbucks, though not listed as part of the Stop Hate For Profit campaign, on Sunday announced that it will “pause advertising on all social media platforms while we continue discussions internally” with media partners and civil rights organizations. “We believe in bringing communities together, both in person and online, and we stand against hate speech,” the coffee conglomerate said. “We believe more must be done to create welcoming and inclusive online communities, and we believe both business leaders and policy makers need to come together to affect real change.”
Growing interest in the boycott garnered Facebook’s attention. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently held a company town hall, where he touched on plans to remove false claims about polling locations in the run-up to the 2020 election. The social network also plans to start addressing transgressive posts from politicians, removing some and labeling others.
