As the US faces a renewed reckoning on racial justice, Facebook has faced unprecedented pressure over the past few weeks to stop the spread of hate speech on its platform.
One of the main people responsible for ratcheting up that pressure is Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. Greenblatt, along with leaders of several other civil rights groups, has organized a historic advertiser boycott of Facebook that has so far prompted more than 1,000 companies, including Starbucks and Unilever, to stop advertising on the social media giant until it makes certain changes. The campaign, called Stop Hate for Profit, is pushing Facebook to appoint a C-level executive with expertise in civil rights and remove Facebook groups devoted to things like Holocaust denialism, among other things.
“We’ve been at this work of fighting anti-Semitism and bigotry in all forms for over 100 years,” Greenblatt told Recode in an interview last week. “And frankly, we believe that Facebook is the front line in fighting hate today.”
Instead of making incremental promises of progress, Facebook instead needs to fundamentally reform, Greenblatt told Recode. “Mark Zuckerberg has really elevated freedom of expression above all else,” Greenblatt said. “But I think that we need to realize that hateful words can have harmful results.”
Here’s what this prominent civil rights leader said Facebook needs to do at a turning point in its years-long struggle to reduce hate speech.
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