Civil-Rights Groups, Facebook Meeting Did Not Go Well

Civil-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, according to The Wall Street Journal.

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 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, 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 Zuckerberg, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, product chief Chris Cox, other members of Facebook’s policy team and a product official, the groups said.

The civil-rights groups 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.