Facebook responds to ‘hate speech’ boycott

The tech giant’s Australian boss says Facebook is reviewing its policies, as advertisers increasingly desert the platform.

Advertisers are giving Facebook the thumbs-down over what they see as ‘hate speech’. Picture: AFP

The sense of crisis enveloping the social media giants is deepening, as major brands continue to leave Facebook, and in some cases social media altogether, due to what they say is inaction on dealing with hate speech.

Some of the world’s most influential advertisers including Coca Cola, Ford, Starbucks and Unilever have pulled millions of dollars worth of advertising from Facebook in recent days, declaring that they don’t want to be associated with perceived hateful content.

The boycott is part of a global campaign, dubbed Stop Hate for Profit, which has enlisted hundreds of companies in the wake of Black Lives Matter rallies and the death of George Floyd.

The unrest has now spread to Australia. Telstra told The Australian is monitoring the situation and mulling its options.

Digital advertising executive Kunal Gupta, the CEO of Sydney-based company Polar, said that the situation will get worse for Facebook and to expect hundreds of advertisers to follow in the coming week.

“What we see here is that the advertisers are not pulling spend because of product failures, like brand safety, lack of transparent measurement or data violations, all previous product failures that Facebook has taken some actions on,” he said.

“They are pulling spend because of Facebook’s moral failure.”

Facebook chairman Mark Zuckerberg. Picture: AFP

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has promised to meet with the growing list of companies this week, and last week lifestreamed part of an employee meeting in a rare effort to aid transparency and appease critics.

In leaked private comments to employees published by tech news website The Information, however, Mr Zuckerberg described the crisis as a ‘PR issue’ and said advertisers would soon return.

“My guess is that all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough,“ he said.

Facebook Australia and New Zealand managing director Will Easton told The Australian, “Over the past few weeks we have been listening to the concerns of our advertising partners, creators and agencies in Australia and New Zealand and discussing the changes we have made to our policies and our services over the last few years and more recently.

“There is a heavy responsibility on companies like Facebook to limit the spread of hate speech and wrestle with the complex issues involved. We’ll continue to work hand-in-hand with our partners and industry experts to develop even more tools, technology and policies to make progress against hate together.”

Mr Gupta added to The Australian that Facebook would likely make further changes in the coming months, but they would be surface changes for PR rather than anything substantial.

“The fear I have is that these changes are not for the right reasons. They are to appease staff, win back client trust and keep regulators at bay, not because Facebook fundamentally believes that they are the right things to do,” he said.

The US tech giants are being increasingly caught towards cleaning up what some perceive as hateful or ‘fake’ content, and others who say the platforms already interfere too much with what they allow on their platforms.

The pressure is forcing some of the tech giants, in some cases for the first time, to abandon their laissez-faire approaches and intervene on politically charged content when they would have previously remained neutral.

Reddit last week banned a pro-Trump sub-reddit, The_Donald, as well as 2,000 other communities across the political spectrum. Twitter has also begun fact-checking Donald Trumps‘s tweets, adding labels like ’manipulated media’ and warnings about that his posts glorify violence.

Millennial-focused platform Snapchat has faced a backlash for its public decision to not allow President Donald Trump‘s posts to be promoted on the platform, a move some has seen as a radical silencing of right-wing views.

In a recent interview Snapchat chief executive Evan Spiegel described his app is a closed platform, and that his company is within its first amendment rights to decide what is promoted or not.

“It‘s a relatively easy and straightforward decision, and we’ll continue to create an experience that reflects our values and promotes the types of content we think are important for our community to see,” he said.

His co-founder Bobby Murphy told The Australian that Snapchat has benefited from focusing on sharing content between friends, rather then broadcasting to an open audience.

That decision to keep communication private has allowed Snapchat to avoid the misinformation and hate speech problems that have plagued rivals Facebook and Twitter. Shares of Snap have risen more than 50 per cent over the past year.

“Snapchat has always been about communication between real friends, and in many of our core markets we‘re an application that people use alongside other apps, not necessarily instead of,” he said.

The decision by platforms like Snapchat to effectively ‘pick sides’ and de-promote some users has alienated conservatives, who feel they’re being censored.

‘Free speech social network’ Parler has seen sign-ups skyrocket in recent days, and it is now the second most popular app in the app store with high profile members including Ted Cruz, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump.

Some think that the recent tumult may result in a more fragmented social media and advertising landscape, with left-wing users sticking to social media platforms like Twitter and right-wing conservatives migrating to platforms like Parler.

“We’re a community town square, an open town square, with no censorship,” Parler chief executive John Matze told CNBC. “If you can say it on the street of New York, you can say it on Parler.”