WWith more than two billion users, Facebook is bigger than Christianity, ”says Stanford law professor Jim Steyer. “His ability to amplify hate speech or white supremacy or racist messages is so extraordinary because of the scale of the platform.”
It’s a typically bold statement from the man who organized the Stop Hate for Profit (SHFP) campaign calling advertisers to pull out of Facebook for the month of July. More than 500 companies have joined the temporary boycott, including Coca-Cola, Adidas, and Unilever.
Facebook’s share price has plummeted, though still high, and last week its chief communications officer, Nick Clegg, was busy trying to persuade anyone who heard that the platform has a “zero tolerance” approach to speech. of hate. But, he wrote in a policy statement released Thursday, “[w]When content is not classified as hate speech … we err on the side of freedom of expression because, ultimately, the best way to counter offensive, divisive, and offensive speech is more speech. Exposing it to sunlight is better than hiding it in the shadows. “
As for Steyer, Clegg, the former deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, has become a spokesperson for social destruction.
“Nick should be embarrassed to present that,” says Steyer. “He and Mark would fail a fifth-grade civics class with their libertarian ‘freedom of speech that triumphs over everything in society.’ The first amendment does not apply to Facebook. The first amendment applies to government restrictions on speech in the United States. “
He says the campaign is not afraid of “embarrassing people who do terrible things to our society” as long as it does not involve ad hominem attacks. As direct as he is in his opinions, some of the heat is taken away from them by the fact that he seems to call everyone by his first name. This may be because he knows everyone. A famous networker, the exuberant 64-year-old is said to be “connected with bigger names than Kevin Bacon.” His “little brother,” as he calls it, is billionaire former hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, who led a remarkably unsuccessful campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. He retired in February, having spent $ 191 million on advertising. .
Among the names he mentions is “Sheryl” – Sandberg, number two on Facebook. Steyer likes to joke that “he is no longer invited to Sheryl’s Hanukkah party,” as a result of his 2012 book, Speaking back to Facebook.
He argued that Facebook, along with other social media platforms, had “a very significant and negative impact on children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development.” Steyer is the founder of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization that promotes safe media and entertainment for children. A New Yorker, he started as a school teacher in Harlem and the South Bronx, moved to civil rights, worked on the death penalty with attorney and activist Bryan Stevenson, and headed the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and began teach civil liberties at Stanford in 1986.
Today, with her blonde hair and an old T-shirt, Steyer looks every inch of California. In our Zoom call, he even uses an image of a surfer’s wave for his screen background. Since his book, his attitude towards Facebook has hardened. Last fall, he caught up in a social media conversation with a new friend, “Sacha,” comic actor Sacha Baron Cohen, best known for satirical inventions Borat and Ali G. “He’s a very, very smart man,” says Steyer. .
They were joined by Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League. From their discussion came the idea of SHFP. Steyer’s intention was to launch the campaign in January, but he decided that more partners were needed. In the event that Baron Cohen made a curt reference to the Facebook CEO when he introduced JoJo Rabbit at the golden globes.
“The hero of this next film is a naive and mistaken boy who spreads Nazi propaganda and has only imaginary friends,” said Baron Cohen. “His name is Mark Zuckerberg.”
It was the protests sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25 that led civil rights groups, including Color of Change and NAACP, to join Steyer. “Many of the arguments for white supremacy and falsehoods about Covid-19 and racial justice were on Facebook,” he explains.
The newly formed coalition’s strategy was to “hit Facebook in the wallet.” But it is a very large and deep wallet. The company generates more than $ 70 billion in annual advertising revenue, and most of that money doesn’t come from big brands but from small businesses.
So far, the boycott has been limited to the United States, meaning that many of the companies that have spoken out about withdrawing their advertising continue to spend money on Facebook in other parts of the world. In fact, some have simply switched their advertising to Instagram (also owned by Facebook) or targeted Facebook users through the Facebook Audience Network.
Steyer is aware of these outings, but says he is amazed at how quickly the campaign has taken off, far exceeding his expectations. In any case, he says, this is only the first stage. SHFP is now looking for a global response, and is looking for the UK and Europe to do the same. They have established an office in London, headed by former Conservative Culture Minister Ed Vaizey.
“It is critical that the UK and Europe denounce,” says Steyer, “because they are incredibly important territories for Facebook and the big tech companies, and there should be a universal rejection of hate speech and racism and mass disinformation because they really are undermining the norms of our democracy. “
But is Facebook to blame for racism and hate speech? Is the work of the communication forums the police content? Until relatively recently, social media giants have done a very effective job of presenting themselves as disinterested platform providers, no longer responsible for what happens on their sites that a phone company is responsible for the conversations that occur between two people who they call. Using section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 to present their case, Silicon Valley companies successfully posed as Internet service providers rather than publishers, meaning they are not legally responsible for user content. . Steyer says it has become his “crusade” to remove this protection from companies like Facebook. “They are the largest publishers in the world,” he complains, “but they are viewed as utilities.”
A complicated factor, and one that SHFP is lobbying for, is that social media, particularly Facebook, has consumed most of the advertising revenue than traditional media, operating with all the restrictions and responsibilities that publishing entails, they relied for a long time. This economic component is only one part of a complex puzzle of intertwined problems and causes that Steyer passionately traces. It is no coincidence, he argues, that growth in unregulated social media has been accompanied by growth in “authoritarian populism.”
He points to the manipulation of social media, electoral subversion, dark Russian operations, and libertarian apologists. And he has a little truck for defense, made by Clegg, that as more than 100 billion messages are posted on Facebook services every day, it’s impossible to capture every hate speech (Clegg claims that almost 90% are delete before reported)
“Don’t tell me they can’t solve that,” says Steyer. “They are a trillion dollar company. If they really wanted to, they could completely clean that platform. ”
SHFP argues that Facebook not only allows too many hate speeches, but has also chosen Breitbart News as a “trusted news source” and has made the right-wing news website The Daily Caller a “fact checker” (one of the third parties that check the accuracy of stories on Facebook). Both publications, says SPFH, have “records of work with known white nationalists.”
SPFH also admonishes Facebook for not actively helping to get the vote out. Is that also your responsibility?
“I didn’t put that there,” Steyer says, before accusing Facebook of allowing voter suppression messages targeting African Americans. Clegg pledged Thursday that “all Facebook users of voting age in the US will receive information, to be prominently displayed at the top of their News Feed, on how to register to vote.”
However, for Steyer, the company’s political leanings are clear. “Zuckerberg has his thumb on the Trump scale,” he says.
Referring to private dinners held between Facebook chief and Donald Trump, and attended by libertarian billionaire and Facebook board member Peter Thiel, Steyer believes that the Facebook hierarchy has allowed the president to use “dishonest advertisements and disinformation “and spread hate. Thiel last week made it known that he will not endorse Trump’s presidential campaign this year due to the economic damage caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Amid the Black Lives Matter protests, Twitter put warnings in some of Trump’s tweets, including the line, notorious for its racist echoes, “when the looting begins, the shooting begins.”
Trump put the same message on Facebook and Instagram without any intervention. Zuckerberg said that while he disagreed with Trump’s language, democratic accountability meant that the president’s words should be available for scrutiny.
“They have allowed him to have violence and hatred …” says Steyer, before leaving.
After getting more excited about his allegations, he suddenly realizes that he strays too far from the set agenda and quickly issues a reminder that the campaign is politically impartial. “It is not Trump that we are focused on. It is hatred, disinformation and racism. All platforms have responsibility, but the biggest criminal is Facebook. “
Ultimately, you would like to see Facebook, which owns WhatsApp and Instagram, broken down and subject to the same publishing guidelines as the old media whose content is marketed. But that, he admits, will be a long fight.
“I will do this for many more years. I am a young man, I like my job and, unlike my brother, I am not running for president. I see this as a mission. “
