RELEASE: NHMC JOINS STOP HATE FOR PROFIT FACEBOOK BOYCOTT

Media Contact:
Araceli Velasco
Chief of Staff
avelasco@nhmc.org
(213)718-0732

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

July 1, 2020 

NHMC JOINS STOP HATE FOR PROFIT FACEBOOK BOYCOTT 

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA (July 1, 2020) - Today the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) joins the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), Color of Change, Common Sense, Free Press, Sleeping Giants, and Mozilla in asking companies to choose safety over profit by boycotting advertising on Facebook during the month of July. This campaign comes on the heels of chronic inaction by Facebook, despite NHMC and other civil rights groups' public concerns on hate speech and calls for change. 
“Mark Zuckerberg is building his fortune, brick by brick, with dollars made off the proliferation of hate on Facebook. Our communities deserve safety and an internet free of hate and disinformation,” said Brenda Victoria Castillo, NHMC President & CEO. “At NHMC, we’re done with Facebook’s empty promises and PR stunts. We’re asking every business, large and small, to join the more than 400 businesses that are hitting Facebook where it hurts–Zuckerberg and shareholders’ bottom line. The time is now for long-lasting change.”
As it works now, algorithmic ad targeting on Facebook has the potential to be dangerous, predatory, and socially harmful to the users those ads reach, with very little oversight from Facebook’s content moderation team. NHMC joins allies in asking that Facebook make the following changes immediately to address hate on their platform: 

1. Establish and empower permanent civil rights infrastructure including C-suite level executive with civil rights expertise to evaluate products and policies for discrimination, bias, and hate. This person would make sure that the design and decisions of this platform considered the impact on all communities and the potential for radicalization and hate.
   
2. Submit to regular, third party, independent audits of identity-based hate and misinformation with summary results published on a publicly accessible website. We simply can no longer trust Facebook’s own claims on what they are or are not doing. A “transparency report” is only as good as its author is independent.
   
3. Provide audit of and refund to advertisers whose ads were shown next to content that was later removed for violations of terms of service. We have documented many examples of companies’ advertisements running alongside the horrible content that Facebook permits. That is not what most advertisers pay for, and they shouldn’t have to.
   
4. Find and remove public and private groups focused on white supremacy, militia, antisemitism, violent conspiracies, Holocaust denialism, vaccine misinformation, and climate denialism.
   
5. Adopting common-sense changes to their policies that will help stem radicalization and hate on the platform.
   
6. Stop recommending or otherwise amplifying groups or content from groups associated with hate, misinformation or conspiracies to users.
   
7. Create an internal mechanism to automatically flag hateful content in private groups for human review. Private groups are not small gatherings of friends - but can be hundreds of thousands of people large, which many hateful groups are.
   
8. Ensure accuracy in political and voting matters by eliminating the politician exemption; removing misinformation related to voting; and prohibiting calls to violence by politicians in any format. Given the importance of political and voting matters for society, Facebook’s carving out an exception in this area is especially dangerous.
   
9. Create expert teams to review submissions of identity-based hate and harassment. Forty two percent of daily users of Facebook have experienced harassment on the platform, and much of this harassment is based on the individual’s identity. Facebook needs to ensure that their teams understand the different types of harassment faced by different groups in order to adjudicate claims.
   
10. Enable individuals facing severe hate and harassment to connect with a live Facebook employee. In no other sector does a company not have a way for victims of their product to seek help.

Hate and Disinformation campaigns prey on our communities, who are already desperate to protect themselves in this unprecedented, tumultuous time. Over 400 companies, including Coca-Cola, Target, Verizon, Starbucks, Ford, Levis, Honda, Microsoft, Reebok, The Clorox Company, The Hershey Company, and Vans, have joined this campaign and pledged to pause advertising on Facebook for the month of July. Support for this campaign is widespread, and has the attention of Senate Democrats, who are also fed up with Facebook’s “lack of action to prevent white supremacist groups from using the platform as a recruitment and organizational tool.” 
The #StopHateForProfit campaign has already cost Facebook over $55 billion in value and over $7 billion in profit for Zuckerberg. NHMC is proud to join the movement and take action against Facebook’s fueling of anti-Black and anti-POC rhetoric that is worsening race relations in the United States. 
Businesses can pledge their pause of advertising and get in touch with the Stop Hate For Profit campaign at stophateforprofit.org/hit-pause-on-hate. Individuals can also support the campaign by signing the Stop Hate For Profit petition and amplifying their support to their individual networks. 
To learn more about the Stop Hate For Profit campaign, visit nhmc.org/stophateforprofit and follow NHMC on social media. 

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