By Christopher Mims
Is the mass advertising boycott hitting Facebook Inc. a
meaningful turning point for the social-media king? Or is it just
another public-relations storm it weathers on its way to joining
the Trillion-Dollar Club?
Companies like Coca-Cola and Unilever are pausing their
social-media spend, citing a variety of reasons, most commonly
their view that Facebook is not doing enough to eliminate hate
speech, and the way the company's products polarize and divide us
all. Sound familiar? Accusations like this are leveled at the
company with some regularity.
The boycott has brought a great deal of attention to the issue.
But it's not Facebook's first "we can do better" moment -- there
have been many, and there will probably be many more.
The concerns raised by advertisers, also including Starbucks and
Microsoft, can be answered with policy tweaks or public statements.
But they can probably never be fixed to the satisfaction of
everyone who feels invested in the behavior of Facebook because of
the nature of political discourse in America and beyond -- and
because of the nature of Facebook itself as a digital forum and a
business.
The content critics flag as unacceptable ranges from posts that
seem unambiguously hateful or maliciously dishonest to content a
significant share of the country might consider part of the
political conversation, even if they disagree with it.
The Anti-Defamation League, part of a coalition that pushed many
advertisers toward a boycott, compiled several examples of the type
of typically right-leaning hate speech and misinformation it says
is still often accompanied by ads from big-name brands. One was a
spoofed image of a woman in a head scarf on an Aunt Jemima-like
syrup bottle with the label "Aunt Jihadi." Another, on a conspiracy
group's page, claims the Federal Emergency Management Agency is
trying to start civil war "just like the days of Hitler," and
includes a photo of a military force rolling through an urban
street, captioned "MARTIAL LAW, FEMA Coffins In The USA."
But the current backlash owes in large part to Facebook's
handling of President Trump's posts on Twitter and Facebook saying
" When the looting starts, the shooting starts." Twitter flagged it
for "glorifying violence." Facebook left it alone, with Chief
Executive Mark Zuckerberg arguing that it's not Facebook's place to
regulate political speech -- a position that infuriated plenty of
his own employees.
In discussions of free speech, Facebook is sometimes likened to
a modern town square, but there's no precedent in history for it.
No town square could ever fit a third of the world's population,
let alone give a megaphone to each of those people.
And nothing of that size could ever be imagined to be governed
by one billionaire and his private army of bots and humans.
Facebook would like to depend on users and algorithms, but it is
increasingly dependent on thousands of low-paid contractors to
interpret its myriad guidelines about what constitutes permissible
content.
All of which helps explain why, to the question of who should
draw lines around what exactly is and isn't acceptable speech, Mr.
Zuckerberg has long favored the answer: "Not us."
After years of being frustrated by Facebook's perceived
inaction, a few groups of academics and civil-rights activists
began last November to discuss encouraging advertisers to boycott
Facebook, says Tristan Harris, president and co-founder of the
nonprofit Center for Humane Technology. He's been advising the
boycott movement, called " Stop Hate for Profit," which, in
addition to the ADL, includes the NAACP, Color of Change and
others.
Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, said that at a
June 1 meeting with Mr. Zuckerberg and Facebook Chief Operating
Officer Sheryl Sandberg, he became frustrated with the company's
inaction, specifically its failure to apply its hate-speech
policies to posts by President Trump, and its failure to bring in
an executive with civil-rights experience. "Toward the end of the
conversation I told Mark and Sheryl, 'What are we doing here, where
we ask for things, and you tell us you're doing things you're not
really doing?'"
Amid months of coronavirus-induced lockdowns and bleak economic
reports, the video of a Minneapolis police officer killing George
Floyd had gone viral and nationwide protests ensued. The ADL saw an
explosion of hate speech and conspiracy theories online, which
catalyzed the group and its partners to act, says its chief
executive Jonathan Greenblatt. Cue the boycott.
Some advertisers have said that pausing spending on Facebook is
solely about "brand safety," making sure their ads don't appear
with objectionable content. Verizon, for example, has clarified
that it is not joining the Stop Hate movement.
Others are riding the same cultural tidal wave that saw brands
posting on social media in support of the Black Lives Matter
movement. Coca-Cola issued a statement, citing racism on the
platforms as well as the social-media industry's lack of
accountability and transparency about where ads appear. A
spokeswoman for Coca-Cola said the company is not officially
joining the Stop Hate For Profit boycott.
Facebook has said it plans to work with the Global Alliance for
Responsible Media, an initiative of the World Federation of
Advertisers, which is working on creating standards for what
constitutes hate speech and other advertiser-unfriendly content.
Facebook will also submit to its first-ever audit by the Media
Ratings Council. The aim is self-regulation, similar to the content
rating systems found in the videogame and film industries, says
Robert Rakowitz, head of GARM.
The businesses withholding ad dollars represent only a fraction
of Facebook's revenue, however. Most of that comes from small and
medium-size companies. But with public pressure still gaining
momentum, there's a chance more could come of this.
So what exactly might a "fixed" Facebook even look like? There
is little consensus.
Some focus on overhauling Section 230 of the Communications
Decency Act, which exempts internet platforms from liability for
the things people say and do on their platforms. Proposals to
curtail or end those protections for Facebook and its rivals have
come from both the right and the left.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) has suggested giving the Federal
Trade Commission expanded powers to review Facebook's
content-related decisions, examining them for bias.
Others, including Mr. Harris of the Center for Humane
Technology, think a better alternative could be something publicly
funded, a sort of Public Broadcasting System for social media. That
would be an enormously complicated new undertaking, with its own
tricky set of First Amendment issues.
Facebook has never been a company that stands mute in the face
of criticism. The company has in the past commissioned independent
human-rights assessments and promised sweeping changes. Just this
week, it announced it would delete hundreds of accounts and groups
devoted to the boogaloo movement, a loose confederation of mostly
young white men obsessed with guns, violence and perceived slights
to their freedom, which formed online and aims to start a civil war
in the U.S.
The endless game of Whac-A-Mole Facebook plays with these kinds
of fringe groups illustrates how much its strategy depends on
reaction to critics, says Mr. Harris. But it also reflects that,
with a service accessed by 2.6 billion people around the world, in
a hundred different languages, addressing all the possible ways
Facebook can be used -- and misused -- is virtually impossible, he
adds.
One of the Stop Hate For Profit movement's key requests is for
Facebook to appoint a C-level executive with deep civil-rights
expertise who examines products and policies for evidence of
discrimination and hate.
It is hard to imagine how that role would fit in Facebook's
hierarchy. Facebook has had senior executives with the power to do
such reviews, including Joel Kaplan, head of global public policy,
and Chris Cox, head of product, who just returned to Facebook a
year after departing over disagreements with Mr. Zuckerberg.
Mr. Kaplan, a conservative at a company whose employees
overwhelmingly lean liberal, has watered down or scuttled many of
the initiatives of engineers at Facebook that had the potential to
make its product less divisive with users, The Wall Street Journal
reported in May. He did this in part because he was concerned they
would disproportionately affect conservative media and voices on
the site, according to the Journal. Mr. Cox was responsible for
many of those failed initiatives before he left the company.
Facebook's response to the boycott campaign so far has mixed a
little fine-tuning with a lot of stay-the-course. Nick Clegg,
Facebook's vice president of communications, wrote on July 1 that
the company has a zero-tolerance policy toward hate speech, but
that finding hate on Facebook's 100 billion daily messages is like
finding a needle in a haystack. The company has tripled its safety
and security team to 35,000 people, he added.
The company also posted a list of responses to the specific
demands of the Stop Hate movement. Among these are expanding a
"brand safety hub" to let advertisers view their ads next to more
types of Facebook content. Expanding this would entail "substantial
technical challenges," the company said.
Another covered the question of potentially violating content in
private groups. The company said it's "exploring ways to make a
group's moderators more accountable for the content," but points
out that permitting or posting violating content already incurs
penalties that can result in a group being closed down.
In a June 26 post on Facebook, Mr. Zuckerberg announced that the
company will crack down on attempts at voter suppression leading up
to the November election, that Facebook identifies close to 90% of
hate speech posted to the site before anyone reports it, and that
the company will get tough on hate speech in advertisements. Mr.
Zuckerberg has also agreed to meet with organizers of the
boycott.
The organizers have zeroed in on the idea that above all, in
business, money talks. And their campaign could yet spur more
substantive action from Facebook. The boycott managed to depress
Facebook's stock price, but only temporarily. The extent of the
damage -- and the extent of Facebook's response -- will likely
depend on how big this boycott gets.
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Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 02, 2020 17:21 ET (21:21 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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