The advertiser boycott campaign of Facebook over how it polices “hate speech” has continued apace, with even Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt warning that “this campaign is not going away.”
The group Stop Hate for Profit released a new video asking if it could trust Mark Zuckerberg while listing its demands for the platform. The examples listed are bizarre choices. The groups or pages it shows have under 2,000 followers. One meme it shows says that white people shouldn’t feel guilty for slavery. (To my knowledge, no living white person in the United States today has ever legally owned slaves.)
Another anti-Muslim meme it shows is a screenshot with a whopping total of five likes. In other words, it’s a “some dude on the Internet” post.
If fringe groups and memes that nobody saw are what the ADL is focused on, you would think hate had been snuffed out of our society pretty well. Facebook has indeed removed hateful content from its site; Louis Farrakhan, Paul Nehlen, and Milo Yiannopoulos got the boot in a purge last year, among others.
This makes the focus on Facebook seem a little bizarre. Greenblatt said that Twitter is one of those platforms “demonstrating what true leadership looks like,” even though Farrakhan’s account, with nearly 350,000 followers, remains up. On its FAQ page, Stop Hate for Profit says its only focus is on Facebook, adding that, “The coalition will work to address hate in all forms and all platforms, but our current focus is Facebook.”
The truth is that Facebook isn’t any more of a bastion for hate than any other corner of the internet, including Twitter. Facebook is being targeted because it takes a more hands-off approach to Donald Trump’s account. You can notice in USA Today’s write-up of the video campaign that Trump is the only person mentioned. Someone such as Ilhan Omar, whom Greenblatt himself has had to condemn for promoting anti-Semitism on Twitter repeatedly, never gets brought up in these conversations.
It’s no coincidence that the New York Times and CNN have also jumped onto this boycott. For them, it’s a chance to settle the score with a social media site that has siphoned off their audiences, and a site where right-wing and conservative content simply performs better. And because Zuckerberg isn’t willing to bend to the whim of every left-wing group that comes knocking in the way Jack Dorsey does, Facebook must be beaten into submission through its advertisers.
