Civil rights groups slam Facebook after call

The coalition of civil rights groups calling for an advertising boycott of Facebook on Tuesday condemned the company’s leadership following a meeting that was meant to address its content moderation policies and efforts to police hateful speech.

Leaders of the NAACP, Color Of Change, Free Press and the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement that a meeting with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other members of Facebook’s leadership left them unconvinced that the platform is committed to tackling issues surrounding “vitriolic hate.”

The representatives said that Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg and Chief Product Officer Christopher Cox failed to commit to addressing the majority of their recommendations on how to handle misinformation and hate speech on the platform.

“Zuckerberg offered the same old defense of white supremacist, antiSemitic, Islamophobic and other hateful groups on Facebook that the Stop Hate For Profit Coalitions, advertisers and society at large have heard too many times before,” they said.

The meeting on Tuesday came as Facebook faces escalating pressure to ramp up its content moderation efforts surrounding incendiary posts, including those shared by President Trump. In the weeks ahead of the meeting, a campaign calling for an ad boycott of the company had gained commitments from more than 400 companies, including Verizon, Starbucks and Coca-Cola.

A majority of the companies have pledged to keep their advertisements off Facebook and Instagram, the photo-sharing app owned by the company, at least through this month. It is unclear if the companies will continue to pull ads from Facebook into August.

The campaign, dubbed “Stop Hate for Profit,” was launched in June in response to what the collection of civil rights groups said was Facebook’s “long history of allowing racist, violent and verifiably false content to run rampant on its platform.” Ahead of the meeting, the campaign shared a list of 10 recommendations they wanted Facebook to commit to, including the establishment of a civil rights infrastructure that includes a C-suite level executive who evaluates products and policies for discrimination, bias, and hate.

Representatives of the campaign said that Zuckerberg and others addressed the hiring of a civil rights position, but would not commit to it being at the executive level. They also said that the execs did not attempt to address the other recommendations, such as the submission of regular third-party audits on hate and misinformation on the platform.

“They showed up to the meeting expecting an A for attendance — attending alone is not enough,” Color Of Change President Rashad Robinson said on a press call with reporters. “At this point we were expecting some very clear, sort of answers to the recommendations we put on the table, and we did not get them.”