Hundreds of companies are boycotting Facebook, demanding the social media giant do more to monitor hate speech. Here's the backstory of the coalition that helped make the boycott happen
Two weeks later, Facebook announced that Zuckerberg would deliver a speech at Georgetown University laying out his thinking on “free expression.” He and Clegg previewed the speech with some of the civil rights leaders. Zuckerberg would be doubling down on the politicians’ exemption, while daring to draw a connection between Facebook and the importance of free speech in U.S. civil rights history, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr.
After the speech sparked a firestorm, Zuckerberg convened a dinner with civil rights leaders at his home in Palo Alto in early November. “The last time I was in a room with all of those leaders, the other person at the table was Barack Obama,” Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change, told me last fall. It was a pleasant enough discussion, but he said it solidified for him that civil rights weren’t a priority at Facebook’s highest levels.
It started on May 29, when President Trump posted — on both Twitter and Facebook — a note about a possible federal response to protests in Minnesota: “Any difficulty and we will assume control, but when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Trump would later say he was simply warning that looting can lead to violence, though many saw the tweet as a dog whistle.
“I’m seeing Mark’s face as he’s trying to explain to Sherrilyn Ifill” — the president of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund — “why something isn’t voter suppression. He’s trying to talk down one of the most important voting rights litigators in the country,” Robinson told me. Gupta says she went into the call eager to hear Zuckerberg’s rationale for dealing with the posts. But she told me, “I was completely dissatisfied with it. It was completely confounding and did not make sense.
Jim Steyer, who heads Common Sense Media, a group focused on improving the media landscape for families and children, knew Matt Rivitz, one of the two leaders of Sleeping Giants, and they had a conversation with Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. Along with Common Sense, the ADL began spreading word through progressive political circles that their small coalition was thinking of pushing for a one-month ad boycott of Facebook.
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