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Facebook boycott: Civil rights leaders condemn Zuckerberg, Facebook for fueling racial hatred and violence

After meeting with Facebook executives Tuesday, civil rights leaders ripped into CEO Mark Zuckerberg, saying he showed no signs of taking steps to curb hatred and violence on the company's platforms.

The sharp rebuke, coming amid escalating calls for reform at the social media giant, set the stage for further conflict in the nearly month-long advertising boycott led by civil rights groups. 

"Zuckerberg offered the same old defense of white supremacist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and other hateful groups on Facebook that the Stop Hate For Profit Coalitions, advertisers and society at large have heard too many times before," the coalition of civil rights group said in a statement. 

According to civil rights leaders who attended, Zuckerberg agreed to hire a high-level executive with civil rights expertise during the meeting, which lasted a little over an hour, but made no other concessions, including changing how it handles President Donald Trump's controversial posts.

"We expected in the call today that we would have some clarity, that we would have some details and that we would have results," Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told reporters. "Unfortunately, we got no details, no clarity and no results."

Facebook did acknowledge the disappointment of civil rights leaders.

"This meeting was an opportunity for us to hear from the campaign organizers and reaffirm our commitment to combating hate on our platform," the company said in a statement. "They want Facebook to be free of hate speech and so do we. That's why it's so important that we work to get this right."

What civil rights groups want:For Facebook to stop hate speech and harassment of Black users

Top brands pull ads:But will the Facebook advertising boycott force the company to change?

The civil rights groups have led a massive backlash against Facebook, with nearly 1,000 companies pulling millions of dollars in advertising to protest the spread of hate speech, violent threats and misinformation on Facebook's platforms.

The leaders came to the meeting with Facebook with a list of 10 demands, none of which were met, NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said. Those demands included submitting to regular independent audits of hate speech and misinformation, removing all hate speech and hate groups and refunding corporations when ads appear next to hate speech.

"We should expect more from a company like Facebook," Johnson said. 

The contentious meeting came as the #StopHateForProfit campaign continues to gain steam.

Seizing on the public conversation over racial injustice and police brutality after the death in police custody of George Floyd to shed new light on the spread of racism and hate on Facebook and Instagram, the campaign quickly dominoed, emerging as a significant threat to Facebook’s public image.

“When we started this we were compelled, because after the death of George Floyd, we saw white nationalists organizing in the open on Facebook to disrupt the Black Lives Matter protests, to undermine them and spread violence. And Facebook, when we showed it to them, did nothing," Greenblatt said. 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg met Tuesday with the civil rights groups behind an advertising boycott.

Facebook has met before with civil rights group leaders, most recently to take issue with the company’s policy of not fact-checking politicians’ ads and its hands-off approach to Trump’s posts.

With such high stakes, Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, said the coalition of civil rights groups and advertisers will not back down

"Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and the entire Facebook community knows that we have come to the table, we've engaged, we've pushed and many times we have gotten from them that they are doing everything they possibly can, that they are making all the changes necessary and then we see the results of changes not implemented, of decisions not enforced and commitments not delivered on," Robinson said. "At the end of the day, this platform is far too important for us not to continue to press and to continue to push forward."

The increased pressure comes as Facebook prepares to release the final civil rights report in a years-long audit. That report, authored by former ACLU director and civil rights attorney Laura Murphy, will be released Wednesday, according to Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

Sandberg, Chris Cox, chief product officer, and Carolyn Everson, vice president of global marketing solutions, also took part in Tuesday’s meeting.

“We have made real progress over the years, but this work is never finished and we know what a big responsibility Facebook has to get better at finding and removing hateful content,” Sandberg wrote in a blog post published prior to the meeting.

Analysts don’t expect Facebook, which makes the vast majority of revenue from ad sales, to take a major financial hit from the boycott. Top brands including Ford and Unilever participating in the boycott represent a fraction of Facebook’s $70 billion in annual revenue. The company, whose market cap is approaching $700 billion, is still expected to have a strong quarter .

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