By Sahil Patel
Facebook Inc. leaders including Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg
and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg are set to meet early
next week with civil rights groups that called for an advertising
boycott against the company over its handling of hate speech and
misinformation.
Among the top requests from the groups will be for Facebook to
hire an executive with civil rights expertise for a post in the
social-media giant's C-suite.
"If they have civil rights leadership that's experienced in the
C-suite, it will keep the company accountable on those issues,"
said Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation
League, one of the organizers of the boycott.
Leaders of civil rights groups are meeting with Facebook
executives after calling for an ad boycott of the platform for the
month of July. Facebook, which has been under growing pressure to
change and update some of its content and brand-safety policies,
this week requested a new meeting with civil rights leaders,
including Mr. Greenblatt, Rashad Robinson, president of Color of
Change, and Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP.
"We share the goal of these organizations; we don't benefit from
hate and we don't want it on our platforms," a Facebook spokeswoman
said in a statement. "We look forward to hearing directly from
these organizations and sharing an update on the investments we've
made and the work we're continuing to do."
The civil rights leaders want Facebook to make meaningful
changes and be more accountable at the top echelons of its
leadership structure. Facebook executives, such as Joel Kaplan, the
company's vice president of global public policy, play a role in
content decisions. But they have a conflict of interest because
they also are looking to curry favor with politicians who may have
their own opinions about content on Facebook, said Mr.
Robinson.
"There needs to be a separation between content security and
safety, and the people who lobby with politicians," Mr. Robinson
said.
The ad boycott is just one of many pressures confronting
Facebook, which also has been under fire from many employees,
activists and Democrats who say it has failed to enforce its rules
against politicians, including President Donald Trump. Several
employees have disagreed publicly with Facebook's stances on a
variety of issues, including its recent decision to leave up a post
by Mr. Trump that many academics and employees say violated the
company's rules about inciting violence.
Some employees say some of these missteps stem from the lack of
diversity at the top of the company. Thursday, a Black Facebook
employee and two job candidates filed a complaint with the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission saying Facebook is biased against
Black employees and makes it more difficult for them to get hired
and promoted. Among other issues, the employee said he heard the
N-word said at work.
"We believe it is essential to provide all employees with a
respectful and safe working environment. We take any allegations of
discrimination seriously and investigate every case," a Facebook
spokesman said in a statement.
The civil-rights groups have listed 10 steps they would like
Facebook to take, and say each one is important. But Mr. Greenblatt
said another priority among them is for regular, outside audits of
identity-based hate speech and misinformation on the company's
platforms, with the results made available publicly.
Facebook's work in this area includes embedding civil rights
expertise on teams across policy and product, the company said.
Whether Facebook will agree to any of the groups' specific
recommendations is far from certain. Facebook executives, including
Carolyn Everson, vice president of its Global Business Group,
previously told advertisers that the company wouldn't change its
policies based on revenue pressure.
Mr. Greenblatt said the boycott wasn't about making a dent in
Facebook's ad revenue, which totaled $69.7 billion last year,
mostly from small and medium-size companies. The goal is to get the
company's attention and encourage change, he said.
Advertisers that have paused spending on Facebook and Instagram
include Unilever PLC, Clorox Co., Starbucks Corp., Ford Motor Co.,
Microsoft Corp., Coca-Cola Co., Levi Strauss & Co. and Verizon
Communications Inc. But not every one of them is a member of the
boycott campaign, and may have different priorities.
Some of the boycott organizers' recommendations speak more
directly to advertising concerns, including broadening Facebook's
brand-safety tools and providing more refunds when ads appear next
to objectionable content.
Facebook issues refunds when ads run in videos and some other
content formats that violate its policies, but the policy doesn't
include ads that run next to Facebook's main news feed, according
to a person familiar with the matter.
Other steps requested of Facebook by the boycott organizers
include the creation of an internal system to automatically flag
hateful content in private groups for human review, and the finding
and removing of public and private groups focused on white
supremacy, violent conspiracies, vaccine misinformation and other
objectionable content.
Facebook addressed some of the groups' requests in a blog post
on Wednesday, describing some of the steps it has taken and its
plans for countering hate speech and misinformation, as well as for
ensuring a safer environment for advertisers. The company said it
already generates reports on suspected hate speech and funnels them
to reviewers with training in identity-based hate policies in 50
markets and 30 languages.
It also said it is exploring ways to make users who moderate
groups on Facebook more accountable for the content in those
groups.
On Tuesday, Facebook also classified a large segment of the
boogaloo movement as a dangerous organization and banned it from
its network for "actively promoting violence against civilians, law
enforcement and government officials and institutions."
Civil rights leaders said they had notified Facebook earlier
about the presence of this movement on its platforms.
"Facebook had a knowledge of the growing boogaloo presence on
their site and they did nothing about it," said Mr. Johnson of the
NAACP. "What must happen is a change in their algorithm so those
white supremacists and hate groups are not directed at their
targeted audiences."
Facebook said it has removed boogaloo content when it has
identified a clear call for violence, including pulling more than
800 posts in the last two months.
Earlier this week, Facebook announced it would include the
prevalence of hate speech as a data point in its Community
Standards Enforcement Report, through which the platform shares
updates on its progress combating content that violates its
policies. The reports are assembled and issued by Facebook, which
said it would now release those reports quarterly.
Mr. Zuckerberg previously said Facebook would look to open its
content moderation systems for external audit. The company also
agreed to a new outside audit by the Media Rating Council, the ad
industry's measurement watchdog, which will evaluate Facebook's
content monetization and brand-safety tools and practices.
Facebook has said that 90% of the hate speech it removes is
found by its artificial-intelligence tools before users report
it.
Mr. Robinson, the Color of Change president, said that doesn't
account for possible hate-speech that goes undetected.
Deepa Seetharaman contributed to this article.
Write to Sahil Patel at sahil.patel@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 02, 2020 19:01 ET (23:01 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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