Saturday, June 27, 2020

Facebook buckles to advertising pressure

Facebook Inc said on Friday that it will start labelling newsworthy content that violates the social media company's policies, and label all posts and ads about voting with links to authoritative information, including those from politicians.

A Facebook spokeswoman confirmed the company's new policy would have covered a link on United States President Donald Trump's post about mail-in ballots last month, to which Facebook's smaller rival Twitter affixed a fact-checking label.

  alJazeera
Zuckerberg had bold reasons of morality and integrity to resist until advertisers started dropping.
The policy change follows an advertising boycott campaign by several US civil rights groups pressuring the company to act on hate speech and misinformation gains traction.

Shares of Facebook and Twitter both fell more than seven percent on Friday after Unilever PLC said it would stop US ads on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for the rest of the year, citing "divisiveness and hate speech during this polarized election period in the US."

Unilever, which owns brands like Dove soap and Lipton tea, and Japanese carmaker Honda Motor Co Ltd's US subsidiary both joined the growing ad boycott against Facebook as part of the "Stop Hate for Profit" campaign started after the death of George Floyd.

[...]

More than 90 advertisers including Unilever's Ben & Jerry's, Verizon Communications Inc and The North Face, a unit of VF Corp, have joined the campaign, according to a list by ad activism group Sleeping Giants, a partner in the campaign.

[...]

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a live-streamed company town hall that Facebook would ban ads that claim people from groups based on race, religion, sexual orientation or immigration status are a threat to physical safety or health.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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