In a rather unsurprising turn of events, Facebook’s “efforts” to stop the ad ban haven’t yielded much results, as the meeting with Facebook ‘boycott’ leaders failed to produce any desirable outcome. At the same time, the promised Oversight Board will not launch until late fall, filling civil rights advocates with disappointment and rage.
The #StopHateForProfit is a high voltage campaign which holds Facebook accountable for tolerating racism and hate speech, especially when it comes to people in power (like Donald Trump). Moreover, civil rights group have accused Facebook of turning a blind eye towards voter suppression, a clear indication of colluding with politicians.
Many multinational companies have joined the protests, threatening Facebook that they would pull out all their ad money from the company, ushering in a non cooperation movement against the tech giant. Companies like Coca-Cola, Honda, Verizon, Starbucks and hundreds of other companies have decided to be a part of the campaign, costing Facebook millions, if not billions of dollars.
Facebook decided that it was time for some disaster control measures, and decided to hold a meeting with leaders of the Facebook boycott movement to discuss the issues at hand and come with a solution. Moreover, the company also agreed to have an independent party conduct a thorough research of its community policies and suggest improvements. While one might think that this would put an end to the barrage of attacks being made at Facebook, they would be wrong.
The meeting took place on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and the chief product officer Chris Cox sat down for over an hour to discuss the campaign. Other members of the policy team and one more member of Facebook’s product team was also present for the meeting, which left the boycott leaders “disappointed”.
Today we saw little and heard just about nothing,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said.
The group wants Facebook to hire a “C-suite level executive” with civil rights expertise, an audit and refunds for advertisers for those that had their adverts wrongfully removed. The initiative is run by organisations like ADL, Color of Change, Sleeping Giants, the NAACP and the tech company Mozilla, and has asked companies to cut advertising on the platform.
However, as it seems, the talks didn’t yield much results. Therefore, users probably shouldn’t expect Starbucks coupons to appear on Facebook anytime soon.
Moreover, the promised “Oversight Board” will not arrive until late fall, which is a testament to Facebook’s cavalier attitude about the whole protest. This pretty much confirms that there will be no such entity until after the Presidential Election, which raises suspicion at the company’s intentions.
We understand many people are eager for the Board to officially begin our task of providing independent oversight of Facebook’s content decisions. We share this urgency, but the Board won’t be operational until late Fall.
— Oversight Board (@OversightBoard) July 7, 2020
What this means for the future of the company is doubtful, but by the looks of it, the ad ban is not going away anytime soon.
