Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg was involved in the meeting with civil-rights groups Tuesday.
Photo: michael reynolds/EPA/ShutterstockCivil-rights advocates came out of a meeting Tuesday with Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg saying they didn’t make progress on their demands over how the social-media giant polices the platform.
The lack of headway, one week into a boycott by some of the company’s top advertisers over the issue, points toward the likelihood of a protracted campaign that could extend beyond July, the original time frame. The organizers said they are asking more advertisers to pause their spending on Facebook globally.
“Facebook had our demands in multiple ways, and they showed up to the meeting expecting an A for attendance,” said Rashad Robinson, head of the Color of Change, a progressive advocacy group for Black communities.
Facebook said in a statement after the meeting that it has invested billions of dollars in content moderation and taken hundreds of white-supremacist entities off its platforms. “They want Facebook to be free of hate speech and so do we,” the company said.
After years of simmering discontent and requests for change, a coalition including the Anti-Defamation League and Color of Change are arguing that Mr. Zuckerberg and Facebook haven’t combated racism and misinformation on its platforms in good faith. Companies including Unilever and Clorox have agreed to pause advertising on the platform in a show of solidarity with demands that Facebook do more.
In response to the discontent, Mr. Zuckerberg had pledged to reconsider its policies around discussion of the government’s use of force. The company has also said it would begin labeling politicians’ posts that have violated its content standards but are protected by Facebook on the grounds that they are newsworthy.
The Zoom meeting lasted a little over an hour and involved Mr. Zuckerberg, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, product chief Chris Cox, other members of Facebook’s policy team and a product official, the groups said.
On paper, the differences between Facebook and civil-rights organizations seem limited. Both agree that incitements to violence have no place on Facebook, that hate speech should be suppressed and that the company should vet its products for potential bias. While there are meaningful disagreements about subjects including Facebook’s refusal to fact-check political advertising, Facebook has said it broadly shares the protesters’ goals.
But the civil-rights groups also argue that Facebook’s enforcement of its policies hasn’t lived up to its past commitments to address misinformation, hate speech, radicalization and brand-safety concerns, and say that many examples of such content are still easy to find on the platform.
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- Facebook Boycott Organizers Want a Civil Rights Expert in the Company’s Executive Suite (July 2)
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Among other things, the civil-rights leaders have pushed Facebook to remove public and private groups that allow white nationalism to thrive. Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive officer of the Anti-Defamation League, which is devoted to combating anti-Semitic speech, said the ADL had previously flagged the growth of these groups on Facebook to no avail.
“They talked about nuance. And Mark specifically said he appreciated the opportunity to hear from us and hear the nuances of the issues,” said Mr. Greenblatt. “And as we said to him, ‘there is no nuance in white nationalism.’”
Facebook said in its statement: “We know we will be judged by our actions not by our words and are grateful to these groups and many others for their continued engagement.”
The civil-rights groups’ other demands include that Facebook create a C-suite-level executive position staffed by someone with civil-rights expertise to ensure greater attention to their concerns, and that it provide refunds to advertisers whose ads are shown next to content that is later removed for violations of its policies.
In a press statement after the meeting, the groups said that Facebook executives acknowledged their push for a new civil-rights-focused executive but that the company wouldn’t say more about the requirements or stature of the role.
The meeting precedes the anticipated Wednesday release of a civil-rights audit commissioned by Facebook from outside attorneys. In progress for two years, the audit has already resulted in changes at the company, Ms. Sandberg said in a Facebook post.
“While we won’t be making every change they call for, we will put more of their proposals into practice soon,” she wrote.
Civil-rights groups’ criticism of Facebook grew in the wake of a free-speech talk Mr. Zuckerberg gave at Georgetown University in October, when the executive framed Facebook as a democratically essential “fifth estate.” Mr. Zuckerberg framed progressive calls to restrain rhetoric on the platform as a greater risk than civil-rights’ leaders concerns about the platform’s misuse.
The Rev. Bernice King, CEO of the King Center, said the talk failed to acknowledge how tolerance for toxic rhetoric set the table for the assassination of her father, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Vanita Gupta, who as head of the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights had been one of the most active liaisons to Facebook, wondered “if there’s any point to engagement at all.”
The gap has only widened since protests over police killings of Black Americans and President Trump’s social media-led rhetoric about Black Lives Matter protesters, alleged corruption in absentee voting and the historical value of Confederate monuments. After Twitter labeled Mr. Trump’s tweet—that “when the looting starts the shooting starts”—as an incitement to violence, civil-rights groups seized on Facebook’s unwillingness to do the same.
—Sahil Patel contributed to this article.
Write to Jeff Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz@wsj.com and Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
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