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2:27 PM PDT 09/16/2020
by
Natalie Jarvey
Kim Kardashian, Kerry Washington, Sacha Baron Cohen, Mark Ruffalo and Dwyane Wade are part of the campaign organized by a coalition of civil rights groups who want the owner of Instagram, Facebook, to stop racism, misinformation and hate speech on their platforms.
On Wednesday morning, Sacha Baron Cohen posted a message on his Instagram informing his 600,000 followers that he would be “freezing” his account for the next 24 hours. Mark Ruffalo had a similar letter for his 18.7 million followers.
The actors, along with more than a dozen celebrities including Kim Kardashian, Kerry Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Dwyane Wade, are part of the Stop Hate for Profit campaign organized by a coalition of civil rights groups who want the owner of Instagram, Facebook, stop racism and misinformation. and incitement to hatred on their platforms.
Jonathan Greenblatt, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League, which helped organize the campaign alongside members of the coalition, including Color of Change, Common Sense and the NAACP, calls the early response from public figures “extraordinary.” It says that the people who have posted about the Instagram freeze reach more than a billion combined followers on Twitter and Instagram.
Not all of those supporters have responded favorably to the campaign. Many, in comments on the posts, have questioned how effective a one-day freeze can be and have suggested that celebrities permanently delete their accounts if they want to take a stand.
Greenblatt shrugs off the criticism, explaining that Stopping Hate for Profit is more about starting a dialogue than it is about affecting Facebook’s bottom line. “It’s about creating a conversation,” he says. “It is about generating a grassroots movement.”
An Instagram representative did not respond to a request for comment.
David Craig, associate clinical director of communications at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, says that while social media companies may not see an impact on their business from a one-day campaign, that doesn’t mean that efforts cannot continue to be effective. “Attempts to force a reckoning from the tech industries, particularly social media platforms, are incredibly important, but are often mostly symbolic and designed to raise awareness,” he says.
For the groups that came together to organize Stop Hate for Profit, the Instagram freeze is a piece of a larger effort. Her first act was organizing an advertising boycott in July that signed more than 1,000 brands, including Coca-Cola, Ford and Verizon. It led to a meeting between the coalition, which also includes the Free Press, LULAC, Mozilla, the National Hispanic Media Center and the Sleeping Giants, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg.
But, says NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson, the group decided to step up its message again after it was revealed that Facebook was unable to remove a page operated by a fringe militia group, Kenosha Guard, which hosted an event to Encouraging armed intervention in Wisconsin City during which 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse killed two people. “We had a tipping point where we needed to step up our advocacy for Facebook to address hateful content on its platform,” says Johnson.
Starting on September 14, the coalition began a week of action in which it encouraged participants to post different messages about Facebook and the importance of voting on their social media accounts.
Greenblatt says Cohen helped spread the word about the Instagram freeze, which comes in the middle of the week-long campaign. The two developed a relationship after Cohen delivered the keynote speech at the ADL Never Is Now Summit in 2019. During the speech, he spoke about the role of social media in spreading conspiracy theories, calling them “the greatest machine of propaganda of history “. He has been a driver of the conversation about Stop Hate for Profit on his social media all summer. Johnson adds that the group took advantage of its networks to attract other participants, explaining that “the celebrity community really supports what we are doing.”
Experts on social media and group behavior say that it is what comes after the Instagram freeze that will be most valuable to the campaign’s lasting impact. Efforts like this, Craig explains, “have to be followed with multiple strategies to really enforce and demand changes on these platforms.”
Greenblatt says the coalition is doing just that. On its website, Stop Hate for Profit suggests that following the freeze, people are asking Facebook to do more to address violence on its platform and remove election-related misinformation. “We will continue to push messages throughout the week,” he says.
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