The meeting was held Tuesday as the social media giant’s leaders met with representatives from Free Press, the NAACP, Color of Change and the Anti-Defamation League, four of the organizations behind the “Stop Hate for Profit” boycott that launched last month. In a news release, Free Press said Facebook had asked for the meeting after nearly 1,000 companies joined their movement and agreed to halt advertising efforts on the platform.
The boycott leaders “didn’t hear anything today to convince us that Zuckerberg and his colleagues are taking action,” Free Press Co-CEO Jessica Gonzalez said in a statement. “Instead of committing to a timeline to root out hate and disinformation on Facebook, the company’s leaders delivered the same old talking points to try to placate us without meeting our demands.”
Gonzalez’s statement continued to say the meeting left her “deeply disappointed.” She said that instead of the “deep humility and reflection” she’d hoped to see, the company’s executives met her with “more dialogue and no action.”
The boycott movement began in mid-June to address Facebook’s “repeated failure to meaningfully address the vast proliferation of hate on its platforms,” a persistent problem organizers said has only worsened during the coronavirus pandemic and protests that erupted in late May in response to the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died while in police custody on May 25.
The movement’s organizers said they chose to aim their protest at the company’s advertising revenue because, according to the company’s earnings reports, a significant chunk of its revenue—about $69.6 billion in 2019—comes from advertisers. Since the boycott was announced on June 17, Verizon, Ford, Target and hundreds of other companies have signed the boycott pledge, promising to halt advertising on Facebook through the end of July.
Though Zuckerberg has said that Facebook plans to invest more than $200 million in supporting Black businesses and announced strategies for fighting voter suppression and hate speech in ads, boycott organizers said his promises to take action did not go far enough. Two weeks later, following Tuesday’s meeting, organizers said the company still does not seem committed to taking measurable action and said they were determined to keep the boycott going as long as they felt it was necessary to do so.
In a statement shared with Newsweek, a Facebook spokesperson said the company was committed to taking steps to abolish hate speech on its platform and said an independent civil rights audit would be released later this week.
“This meeting was an opportunity for us to hear from the campaign organizers and reaffirm our commitment to combating hate on our platform,” the spokesperson said. “They want Facebook to be free of hate speech and so do we. That’s why it’s so important that we work to get this right.
“As a company, we have agreed to an independent civil rights audit which will be released tomorrow. We have invested billions in people and technology to keep hate off of our platform. We have created new policies to prohibit voter and census interference and have launched the largest voting information campaign in American history. We have banned more than 250 white supremacist organizations and are holding ourselves accountable by producing regular reports about our content moderation efforts.
“We know we will be judged by our actions, not by our words and are grateful to these groups and many others for their continued engagement.”