The chief marketing officer of security firm Dashlane is accusing advertisers who use Facebook of helping “bankroll” political divisiveness.
A coalition of civil rights organizations last week launched a campaign to persuade advertisers to boycott Facebook over its policies, its policing of hate speech, and its impact on society — and the effort is now gaining steam. Its supporters include The North Face, online therapy tool Talkspace, and REI, and on Monday, outdoor apparel firm Patagonia and password manager Dashlane got on board.
In an interview with Business Insider, Dashlane’s CMO Joy Howard said marketers shared the responsibility for Facebook’s negative impacts on society. “We’ve been quiet for far too long as these platforms have amplified polarization within our society, and we’ve bankrolled it,” she said.
NAACP, Color of Change, and Anti-Defamation League are among the groups spearheading the campaign that asks companies to halt all advertising on Facebook during July.
“In response to Facebook’s repeated failure to meaningfully address the vast proliferation of hate on its platforms, six organizations today announced a new campaign, #StopHateforProfit, that asks large Facebook advertisers to show they will not support a company that puts profit over safety,” they said in a joint announcement. It was launched after Facebook refused to take down posts by Trump that critics said glorified violence against protesters, a decision that sparked internal outrage among employees at the company.
In a statement, Facebook advertising exec Carolyn Everson said: “We deeply respect any brand’s decision, and remain focused on the important work of removing hate speech and providing critical voting information. Our conversations with marketers and civil rights organizations are about how, together, we can be a force for good.”
Howard said that she hoped to pressure Facebook to do more to police hate speech and misinformation on the social network, which is used by roughly 1.7 billion people every day.
“I think they need to take a more active role around policing hate speech and conspiracy theories on the platform,” she said. “There’s a difference between freedom of speech and freedom of reach. So really looking closely at not only what’s on the platform, but how their algorithms magnify the intensity of hate on the platforms, is something that I think would be a really great step forward.”
She also blamed Facebook for sowing political division, and said advertisers had a responsibility to speak out about the issue.
“The Facebook algorithm has been a black box, and nobody really understands how it works. But I think you can see how it actually works on society, and you can see how the content that’s most enraging is the content that’s most profitable for them, and they really created a machine to amplify and magnify that,” she said.
“We’ve been quiet for far too long … I think it’s really time for us to take a leadership role and ask for change … if people cannot trust the information that they’re getting on the platforms, then [ads for a brand] showing up alongside that information doesn’t really build trust in your brand either.”
WhatsApp us