A coalition for civil rights in the United States, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL for its acronym in English) has launched a campaign calling on large corporations to boycott Facebook due to the company's "repeated failure to meaningfully address the widespread proliferation of hate on its platforms."

Major brands in the United States join the boycott of Facebook

In response to the call to boycott Facebook, the clothing brand The North Face was the first among large companies in the United States to join this campaign, which was followed by REI, Patagonia, UpWork and Dashlane.

“We are in, we are out,” The North Face tweeted last Friday accompanied by the hashtag “#StopHateForProfit” which in Spanish can be translated as “stop hate for profit”.

North Face's commitment is to stop its ads on Facebook and Instagram, according to statements in its statement, even though it will continue to create organic content on Instagram.

Craig Hodges, a spokesman for The North Face parent VF Corp, said several other company brands are considering joining the call to boycott Facebook. The company also owns well-known brands such as Dickies, Vans, Timberland and Smartwool, among others. To give us an idea of ​​the impact that this boycott could have on the advertising coffers of the large social network, VF Corp, parent of North Face, spent 756 million dollars (just over 668 million euros) on advertising during the last year. .

“The North Face has halted all paid activity and advertising on Facebook in the United States until stricter policies are put in place to prevent racist, violent or hateful content, as well as false information circulating on its platform,” it said. the notice.

REI, the specialty outdoor equipment retailer in the United States, joined The North Face shortly after it announced its joining the boycott of Facebook. "For 82 years we have put people before profit," the company said in a tweet. “We will remove all advertising from Facebook/Instagram for the month of July”

Unilever and Starbucks are the latest major companies to announce that they are pausing their ad spend "across all social platforms." The list keeps growing. As of Sunday, more than 160 companies have decided to suspend advertising on Facebook in response to the company's lack of commitment to curbing toxic information and hate speech.

< p lang="en" dir="ltr">@davidaxelrod @MittRomney she is showing him how to contact Vlad directly

— julia farrell Tue Nov 29 03:29:34 +0000 2016

Brands will stop running ads on Instagram and Facebook as a measure to moderate hate speech and misinformation on the platform

For its part, Patagonia, another outdoor clothing brand also joined the boycott on Facebook this week. "From safe elections to a global pandemic and racial injustice, the stakes are too high to sit back and let the company continue to be complicit in spreading misinformation and fomenting fear and hate," was the harsh tweet the company launched in a thread.

“As businesses across the country work hard to ensure Americans have access to free and fair elections this fall, we can't wait and put resources into the companies that are contributing to the problem.”

One more brand to join the Facebook boycott is Ben & Jerry's. This American ice cream giant assured that it stands with “our friends NAACP, and Color of Change, ADL and all those who call for Facebook to take stronger measures to prevent their platforms from being used to divide our nation, suppress voters, promote and fan the flames of racism and violence and undermine our democracy," the company said in a statement on its website.

“Starting July 1st, we will be pausing all paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram in the US as part of the #StopHateForProfit campaign.”

In a statement to CNN, Carolyn Everson, vice president of Facebook's global business group, responded to this campaign: "We deeply respect any brand's decision and remain focused on the important work of eliminating hate speech and providing critical information voting. Our conversations with marketers and civil rights organizations are about how, together, we can be a force for good."

That didn't stop other companies like Verizon, Levi's, Procter & Gamble, Hershey or Coca-Cola decide to do the same and stop advertising on various social networks. In the case of Coca-Cola, it was indicated that the pause would last "at least 30 days", but the periods of advertising inactivity vary in different cases.

Not only Facebook or Instagram are affected: Twitter has also been part of the boycott despite the fact that this social network has taken certain measures, such as labeling some of Donald Trump's latest messages to provide context to its users and that they be informed of certain statements by the president. YouTube, owned by Google, has also been affected in cases such as the recent Starbucks announcement, and even YouTubers themselves who are being forced to remove old content due to the multiple comments they receive.

What Zuckerberg said, and how the boycott of Facebook is affecting it

Zuckerberg himself has published a post on Facebook in which he has announced several measures to deal with the problem. For years it has refused to apply controls to prevent the use of its platform for political intoxication and the spread of conspiracies and hate speech.

In his post, he announced a new policy that will prohibit any message related to so-called hate speech on his platform, that is, messages with content that, according to Facebook editors, promotes discrimination. It will also ban ads that scapegoat minorities, immigrants, racial or other groups.

In addition, it will label the contents that it considers of special journalistic value for the public. The decision seems to be aimed at promoting relevant content.

Facebook has always reacted timidly to criticism in areas such as privacy, but in the latest incident with Trump's inflammatory messages, the creator of Facebook insisted that the platform does not want to be an "arbiter of truth" and does not want to moderate content (although it does in some cases) when they come from people like Donald Trump, whose messages have been tagged and even censored on Twitter but left untouched on Facebook.

The effect of this boycott is unclear, but according to Pathmatics data, thousands of them would need to join in order to have any impact on Facebook's advertising business.

Still, Facebook shares were down 8% on Friday. This figure means erasing in one day about 49,000 million euros of the value of the company. For Zuckerberg, it meant a loss of approximately 6.3 billion euros in his personal fortune.

Stay informed of the most relevant news on our Telegram channel