Mark Zuckerberg finally promises action on hate speech as Facebook shares drop $56 BILLION after Unilever and Coca-Cola pulled their advertisements
Facebook shares have dropped a staggering $56 billion after major companies including Unilever and Coca-Cola pulled their advertisements from the social media giant, despite CEO Mark Zuckerberg promising action on hate speech and putting a warning label on a Republican National Committee (RNC) video.
Shares in the platform went crashing 8.3 percent to $216.08 by the closing bell Friday - its lowest in three months - after more than 100 advertisers boycotted the firm for its failure to stop hate speech and misinformation being posted on its platform.
This wiped $56 billion off Facebook’s market value and dealt a hefty $7.2 billion blow to Zuckerberg's personal fortune, pushing him down from third to fourth place on Bloomberg Billionaires Index and leaving him with a new net worth of $82.3 billion.
This came after Coca-Cola and Unilever became the latest major corporations to pull the plug on Facebook advertising Friday, joining several firms including Dove, Honda and Ben & Jerry's in a show of support for the #StopHateForProfit campaign.
Coca-Cola announced a pause on all paid social media advertising globally for at least 30 days saying 'there is no place for racism in the world and there is no place for racism on social media' while Unilever, one of the world’s biggest advertisers, said it would stop spending money with Facebook for the rest of the year.
Zuckerberg buckled under the pressure Friday and announced new content policies for the platform, including tighter restrictions on advertising and labels for 'harmful' posts from public figures.
Facebook has put a warning label on a video posted by the Republican National Committee about 'left-wing anarchists' after CEO Mark Zuckerberg caved and said the social media giant would ban hate speech on the platform following a boycott by 100 advertisers
The GOP appears to be one of the first to face the clampdown on 'harmful' and 'hateful' content, after Facebook put a warning label on a video posted by the RNC about 'left-wing anarchists' Friday.
The platform put a 'violent or graphic content' warning on the video named 'It's about destroying America' which features footage of cop cars on fire alongside snippets of speeches made by Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors as well as Democrats Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
'This video may show violent or graphic content,' the Facebook warning reads. 'We covered this video so you can decide if you want to see it.'
The video opens with footage of Cullors saying 'we are trained Marxists' before it goes on to show snippets of violent scenes across America amid the ongoing civil unrest in the wake of the Memorial Day 'murder' of black man George Floyd by a white cop in Minneapolis.
'The 'trained Marxists' are on a violent rampage,' flashes up on the screen as the video shows select scenes of a cop being hit by a car, an LA police cruiser on fire, a toppled statue of Ulysses Grant and St. John's Church on fire during protests calling for an end to police brutality and racism.
It also contains undated, edited footage of Democrat rivals.
Zuckerberg said in a Facebook Live video on Friday that the company would begin labeling 'harmful' content from politicians that remains 'newsworthy'
Speaker Pelosi is heard saying 'I don't even know why there aren't uprisings all over the country and maybe there will be' while presidential candidate Biden says 'we have an incredible opportunity to fundamentally transform the country'.
'Make sure police departments are defunded,' Ocasio-Cortez says in a clip followed up by Rep. Ilhan Omar who makes a call to 'completely dismantle' the Minneapolis Police Department.
The footage, which ends by telling viewers to 'Vote for Trump', makes claims that the so-called 'anarchists' are attacking police officers, 'ripping apart communities' and 'destroying America'.
The warning sign comes as the social media giant has come under fire for not removing or labeling hate speech, such as posts by Donald Trump and misinformation about the Black Lives Matter protests.
More than 100 companies have so far joined the Facebook boycott with Coca-Cola announcing Friday it was joining the likes of Dove, Unilever and Verizon.
'The Coca-Cola Company will pause paid advertising on all social media platforms globally for at least 30 days,' Coca-Cola CEO and Chairman, James Quincey, said in a statement, adding the company is not joining the official boycott.
'We will take this time to reassess our advertising policies to determine whether revisions are needed. We also expect greater accountability and transparency from our social media partners.'
Zuckerberg responded to the boycott in a Facebook Live video Friday where he announced the company would begin labeling 'harmful' content from politicians that remains 'newsworthy'.
Though he did not name Trump, the policy comes in response to a campaign demanding Facebook impose tighter restrictions on 'misinformation' in the president's campaign ads, and on his inflammatory posts.
Twitter has already slapped warning labels on some of the president's tweets that it deemed abusive or threatening, and unlike Facebook, Twitter banned all political campaign ads.
Zuckerberg slammed the move when Twitter first labeled a Trump tweet, saying it wasn't up to social media companies to be the 'arbiters of truth' - but the Facebook CEO appears to have had a change of heart following the punishing advertiser boycott.
Coca-Cola announced a pause on all paid social media advertising globally for at least 30 days saying 'there is no place for racism in the world and there is no place for racism on social media'
North Face was first to pledge its allegiance to the civil rights groups last week and now several major companies including ice cream maker Ben & Jerry's have joined the boycott
'We will soon start labeling some of the content we leave up because it is deemed newsworthy, so people can know when this is the case,' Zuckerberg said in the livestream.
'We'll allow people to share this content to condemn it, just like we do with other problematic content, because this is an important part of how we discuss what's acceptable in our society - but we'll add a prompt to tell people that the content they're sharing may violate our policies,' he continued.
Zuckerberg also announced new policies cracking down on hateful language in ads, as well as guidelines on voting information.
'We already restrict certain types of content in ads that we allow in regular posts, but we want to do more to prohibit the kind of divisive and inflammatory language that has been used to sow discord,' Zuckerberg said.
'So today we're prohibiting a wider category of hateful content in ads. Specifically, we're expanding our ads policy to prohibit claims that people from a specific race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, gender identity or immigration status are a threat to the physical safety, health or survival of others,' he said.
'We're also expanding our policies to better protect immigrants, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers from ads suggesting these groups are inferior or expressing contempt, dismissal or disgust directed at them,' he continued.
It follows an advertiser boycott that grew rapidly over the past week, organized by activists demanding Facebook impose greater restrictions on hate speech and misinformation. Honda and Unilver were the latest large companies to join the boycott.
However, Zuckerberg did not directly address the boycott in his address. At least some of the boycott organizers said that Zuckerberg's new policies were inadequate.
'Zuckerberg's address was 11 minutes of wasted opportunity to commit to change,' tweeted Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, an organizer of the 'Stop Hate For Profit' boycott campaign.
'I hope companies advertising on Facebook were watching - if they want to put their money where their mouth is on racial justice, then it's time to #StopHateForProfit,' Robinson added.
'Today, Mark Zuckerberg responded with small changes that don't adequately address #hate & misinformation,' tweeted Johnathan Greenblatt, president of the Anti-Defamation League, a key backer of the boycott.
Greenblatt said that if Facebook were 'serious', they would have enacted the activists' detailed list of demands.
Unilever said on Friday it will stop advertising on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in the United States for the rest of the year, citing 'divisiveness and hate speech during this polarized election period in the U.S.'
The consumer goods company, which owns brands like Dove Soap and Lipton tea, joins a growing advertising boycott against Facebook as part of the 'Stop Hate for Profit' campaign started by U.S. activists after the death of George Floyd.
The effort called on Facebook, which owns Instagram, to do more to stop hate speech, and criticized the company for not doing more to restrict posts and campaign ads from President Donald Trump.
Unilever subsidiary Ben & Jerry's, which has an independent board, previously announced it would join the boycott on Facebook earlier this week, possibly putting pressure on the parent company headquartered in London, which has an annual global advertising budget of nearly $8 billion.
Unilever said on Friday it will stop advertising on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in the United States for 2020
'Continuing to advertise on these platforms at this time would not add value to people and society. We will be monitoring ongoing and will revisit our current position if necessary,' Unilever said in a statement.
The company, which is based in the Netherlands and Britain, joins a raft of other companies halting advertising on online platforms.
Facebook in particular has been the target of an escalating movement to siphon away advertising dollars in a bid to pressure the social media-giant to do more to prevent racist and violent content from being shared on its platform.
'We have decided that starting now through at least the end of the year, we will not run brand advertising in social media newsfeed platforms Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in the U.S.,' Unilever said.
On Thursday, Verizon joined others in the Facebook boycott.
Sarah Personette, vice president of global client solutions at Twitter, said the company's 'mission is to serve the public conversation and ensure Twitter is a place where people can make human connections, seek and receive authentic and credible information, and express themselves freely and safely.'
She added that Twitter is 'respectful of our partners´ decisions and will continue to work and communicate closely with them during this time.'
Shares in Facebook, which is based in Menlo Park, California, fell about 7 percent Friday. San Francisco-based Twitter's shares were also off about 7 percent.
The #StopHateForProfit campaign comes as Facebook faces growing pressure over its hands-off approach to misinformation and inflammatory posts, including from Trump.
The social media company made an estimated $70 billion annually from ads, the coalition claimed in a statement on the ADL website.
The campaign has criticized Zuckerberg's decision to not moderate the president, after the CEO again defended his decision not to limit Trump's often controversial, incendiary and inaccurate posts.
Twitter's decision in May to hide one of Trump's tweets for 'glorifying violence' exposed turmoil at Facebook, with employees rebelling against Zuckerberg's refusal to sanction false or inflammatory posts by the president.
Facebook last week said it removed ads by Trump's re-election campaign that contained a symbol used in Nazi Germany for political prisoners, a move welcomed by rights activists.
The activists called on Facebook to crack down harder on Trump and his campaign as the November election looms.
'It is clear that Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, are no longer simply negligent, but in fact, complacent in the spread of misinformation, despite the irreversible damage to our democracy,' the NAACP said in a tweet.
The coalition criticized Zuckerberg's decision late last month to leave up a particularly inflammatory Trump post, which stated in part: 'When the looting starts, the shooting starts'. Twitter hid the same message behind a warning that said the post 'incited violence'.
Several Facebook employees staged a 'virtual walkout' over Zuckerberg's decision.
The Facebook co-founder then held a conference call with civil rights leaders who condemned him for failing to remove the post.
In a subsequent statement, Rashad Robinson of Color of Change, Vanita Gupta of the Leadership Conference and Sherrilyn Ifill of LDF said: 'He [Zuckerberg] did not demonstrate understanding of historic or modern-day voter suppression and he refuses to acknowledge how Facebook is facilitating Trump's call for violence against protesters. Mark is setting a very dangerous precedent for other voices who would say similar harmful things on Facebook.'
