Coca-Cola, Honda and Unilever Join Facebook Ad Boycott
The #StopHateForProfit campaign has picked up steam as major brands have pulled ads from Facebook in condemnation of the social media platform’s inadequate content moderation.
On Friday, Coca-Cola, Honda and Unilever each made pledges to pull their advertisements from Facebook for a period of months, citing the company’s handling of hate speech online.
The three aforementioned companies join a growing list of major advertisers that are now boycotting Facebook, with some abandoning advertisements on other social media platforms as well. In total, over 100 major and minor brands have now ceased advertising on Facebook.
The movement began in early June as a coalition of civil rights groups, including the ADL and NAACP, launched the StopHateForProfit hashtag and called on corporations to stop advertising on Facebook. The core issue of the campaign was Facebook’s “repeated failure to meaningfully address the vast proliferation of hate on its platforms.”
In response to the mass desertion of advertisers, Mark Zuckerberg pledged changes to Facebook’s content moderation policy on Friday. Going forward, Facebook will ban advertisements that describe groups of people, based on race or citizenship status, as a “threat”, and will also remove content that it judges as inciting violence or attempting to suppress voting.
These changes were not enough to mollify advertisers, as Coca-Cola, Honda and Hershey’s each pulled their ads later that afternoon. Clothing group Levi’s also ceased advertising, stating that Zuckerberg’s response was “simply not enough”.
Facebook makes around 98% of its $70 billion annual revenue through advertising. Friday’s announcements saw the company’s share price fall by 7%.
