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The 2020 Facebook ad boycotts were a group of boycotts that took place during the month of July 2020. Much of the boycotts were organized under the Stop Hate for Profit campaign, launched by the advocacy groups the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Color of Change, Common Sense Media, Free Press and Sleeping Giants. Over 1,000 companies participated in the boycott. [1] [2]
In June 2020, Facebook refused to censor a post that contained Donald Trump's "When the looting starts, the shooting starts" statement, as well as a post by Trump that criticized the CHAZ. Mark Zuckerberg later defended this move. This led to immense criticism and later became one of the factors leading to the boycott. [1] [3]
According to Jonathan Greenblatt, one of the organizers behind the boycott, the idea for the boycott arose because his organization thought that Facebook was not doing enough to censor hate speech. He requested a meeting with Facebook representatives but was turned down. After communicating with Rashad Robinson and Derrick Johnson, the three of them launched the campaign. [2]
On June 17, the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Color of Change, Common Sense Media, Free Press and Sleeping Giants revealed the Stop Hate for Profit campaign through a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times. [4] [5] The coalition of organizations grew to include the League of United Latin American Citizens, Mozilla and the National Hispanic Media Coalition. The Stop Hate for Profit campaign called for an ad pause in June 2020, asking companies to pause spending on Facebook and Instagram ads for July 2020. [6]
On June 19, The North Face and REI announced their plans to join the boycott. [7] [8] Shortly thereafter, Upwork and Patagonia announced that they would join the boycott. [9]
On June 24, Ben & Jerry's announced that it would join the boycott. [3] The next day, Verizon announced that it would join the boycott. [10]
On June 26, Unilever announced that it would join the boycott. [11] The next day, one of the organizers of the boycott announced that the boycott would now aim to include European companies. [12] In addition, Coca-Cola announced that it would join the boycott. [13]
On July 7, the organizers of the boycott met with Facebook representatives as well as Zuckerberg. The organizers disliked the meeting, and brought up how Facebook did not set any dates or make detailed plans. [14] [15]
The following is a non-exhaustive list of participants:
Writing for The Verge , Casey Newton argued that the companies that took part in the boycott acted "as if Facebook doesn't ban hate speech at all", and that the boycott should've focused on the company's monopoly power. [25]
Several writers noted that many businesses had already cut their marketing budgets due to the COVID-19 pandemic. [1] [22] [25] Most of Facebook's revenue comes from small to mid-sized companies, and the top 100 advertisers only comprise 6% of the total revenue, suggesting that a boycott would be futile. [26] The long-term impact of the boycott was expected to be minimal, as an industry analyst predicted that advertisers would ramp up spending during the period. [1]
On June 26, the share price of Facebook dropped by 8.3%. On the same day, Mark Zuckerberg stated that the company would begin to place "warning labels" on posts such as those by Trump. In addition, the company would prohibit certain types of ads and misinformation related to voting. This was criticized by the organizers of the boycott. [27]
On June 30, Facebook removed several groups and users associated with the Boogaloo movement. [28]
In August 2020, Facebook and Instagram began removing 1,500 QAnon pages and groups that discussed violence, and in early October reportedly committed to removing all QAnon content, even if it does not explicitly refer to violence. [29] On October 12, CNN [30] and other news outlets cited recent increased pressure, including from the #StopHateForProfit boycott and campaign's nonprofit organizers, such as Color of Change, the Anti-Defamation League, and NAACP [31] [32] in Zuckerberg's decision to expand Facebook's "hate speech policy to include content that 'denies or distorts the Holocaust', a major shift for the platform, which has repeatedly come under fire for its inaction on hateful and false information."
The American Family Association (AFA) is a conservative and Christian fundamentalist 501(c)(3) organization based in the United States. It opposes LGBT rights and expression, pornography, and abortion. It also takes a position on a variety of other public policy goals. It was founded in 1977 by Donald Wildmon as the National Federation for Decency and is headquartered in Tupelo, Mississippi.
Media Matters for America (MMfA) is a non-profit left-leaning watchdog journalism organization. It was founded in 2004 by journalist and political activist David Brock as a counterweight to the conservative Media Research Center. It seeks to spotlight "conservative misinformation" in the U.S. media; its methods include issuing reports and quick responses. Two example initiatives include the "Drop Fox" campaign (2011–2013) that sought to discredit Fox News' "fair and balanced" claims; and a 2023 report about X that highlighted antisemitism on the platform.
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American businessman. He co-founded the social media service Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms, of which he is chairman, chief executive officer and controlling shareholder. Zuckerberg has been the subject of multiple lawsuits regarding the creation and ownership of the website as well as issues such as user privacy.
QAnon is a far-right American political conspiracy theory and political movement that originated in 2017. QAnon centers on fabricated claims made by an anonymous individual or individuals known as "Q". Those claims have been relayed and developed by online communities and influencers. Their core belief is that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic child molesters is operating a global child sex trafficking ring that conspired against president Donald Trump. QAnon has direct roots in Pizzagate, an Internet conspiracy theory that appeared one year earlier, but also incorporates elements of many different conspiracy theories and unifies them into a larger interconnected conspiracy theory. QAnon has been described as a cult.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), formerly Brixton Endeavors, is a British not-for-profit NGO company with offices in London and Washington, D.C. with the stated purpose of stopping the spread of online hate speech and disinformation. It campaigns to deplatform people that it believes promote hate or misinformation, and campaigns to restrict media organisations such as The Daily Wire from advertising. CCDH is a member of the Stop Hate For Profit coalition.
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by American technology conglomerate Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, its name derives from the face book directories often given to American university students. Membership was initially limited to Harvard students, gradually expanding to other North American universities. Since 2006, Facebook allows everyone to register from 13 years old, except in the case of a handful of nations, where the age limit is 14 years. As of December 2022, Facebook claimed almost 3 billion monthly active users. As of October 2023, Facebook ranked as the third-most-visited website in the world, with 22.56% of its traffic coming from the United States. It was the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s.
Adriel O. Hampton is an American, and Californian, entrepreneur, strategist, and political activist. He runs The Adriel Hampton Group, a digital advertising agency that supports progressive causes. He is the founder of The Really Online Lefty League political action committee (PAC).
Facebook is a social networking service originally launched as TheFacebook on February 4, 2004, before changing its name to simply Facebook in August 2005. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually most universities in the United States and Canada, corporations, and by September 2006, to everyone with a valid email address along with an age requirement of being 13 or older.
Common Sense Media (CSM) is an American nonprofit organization that reviews and provides ratings for media and technology with the goal of providing information on their suitability for children. It also funds research on the role of media in the lives of children and advocates publicly for child-friendly policies and laws regarding media.
Oracle Advertising, formerly Datalogix, is a cloud-based consumer data collection, activation, and measurement platform for use by digital advertisers. Datalogix was a consumer data collection company based in Westminster, Colorado that provided offline consumer spending data to marketers. In December 2014, Oracle signed an agreement to acquire Datalogix. After the acquisition, Datalogix's name changed to Oracle Data Cloud, which later became Oracle Advertising. Oracle Advertising is part of the Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience (CX) application suite.
Stop Funding Hate is a pressure group which asks companies to stop advertising in, and thus stop providing funds for, certain British newspapers that it argues use "fear and division to sell more papers".
Facebook has been involved in multiple controversies involving censorship of content, removing or omitting information from its services in order to comply with company policies, legal demands, and government censorship laws.
Sleeping Giants is a social media activism organization aiming to pressure companies into removing advertisements from several conservative news outlets by publicly accusing them of malpractices such as misinformation and hate speech. The campaign started in November 2016, shortly after Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 United States presidential election, with the launch of a Twitter account aiming to boycott Breitbart News. The campaign has sections in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France and Germany.
Derrick Johnson is an American lawyer and humanitarian. He serves as the 17th President and CEO of the NAACP. He had previously served as president of its Mississippi state chapter, and vice chairman of its board of directors. Johnson is the founder of the Mississippi nonprofit group One Voice Inc., which aims to improve quality of life for African Americans through public engagement.
MeWe is a global social media and social networking service. As a company based in Los Angeles, California it is also known as Sgrouples, Inc., doing business as MeWe. The site has been described as a Facebook alternative due to its focus on data privacy.
Meta Platforms, Inc., doing business as Meta, and formerly named Facebook, Inc., and TheFacebook, Inc., is an American multinational technology conglomerate based in Menlo Park, California. The company owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, among other products and services. Meta ranks among the largest American information technology companies, alongside other Big Five corporations Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. The company was ranked #31 on the Forbes Global 2000 ranking in 2023. In 2022, Meta was the company with the third-highest expenditure on research and development worldwide, with R&D expenditure amounting to US$35.3 billion.
The Stop Mandatory Vaccination website and associated Facebook group are some of the major hubs of the American anti-vaccination movement. It was established by anti-vaccination activist Larry Cook in 2015.
In 2021, an internal document leak from the company then known as Facebook showed it was aware of harmful societal effects from its platforms, yet persisted in prioritizing profit over addressing these harms. The leak, released by whistleblower Frances Haugen, resulted in reporting from The Wall Street Journal in September, as The Facebook Files series, as well as the Facebook Papers, by a consortium of news outlets the next month.
Facebook and Meta Platforms have been criticized for their management of various content on posts, photos and entire groups and profiles. This includes but is not limited to allowing violent content, including content related to war crimes, and not limiting the spread of fake news and COVID-19 misinformation on their platform, as well as allowing incitement of violence against multiple groups.
Linda Yaccarino is an American executive who has served as the chief executive officer of X Corp since June 2023. She previously held the position of chairman of global advertising & partnerships for NBCUniversal.