Angelika Gifford comments on the advertising boycott

Angelika Gifford, Head of Europe on Facebook.

Olga Kysliuk

Angelika Gifford has been running Facebook’s European business since January. As a seasoned IT manager (Microsoft, HP), she is “the adult in the room” at the relatively young Facebook. Before the European boss can deal intensively with expanding to the three dozen or more countries in her area, she must face the advertising boycott; More than a thousand advertisers started this in the summer as a protest against hate speech on the platform. Many corporations such as Coca-Cola are still adamant about the boycott.

Although the multiple member of the board of directors (Thyssen Krupp, TUI, Rothschild & Co and until recently ProSiebenSat.1) and the author of NZZ see each other for the first time, Gifford suggests that they address you rather than you, it that creates distance. It may be the 54-year-old’s attempt to bring Facebook’s corporate culture into the conversation, or it may be the attempt to build a bridge to media workers.

When you signed the employment contract at Facebook last year, what did you think awaited you? And what was the reality then?

For me, Facebook is a logical step in my career. I have worked in technology for over twenty years. I drove digital transformation at both Microsoft and HP. And now I have another responsibility, that is, to get more involved in areas of social relevance. And my second job is to be really responsible. Privacy, data protection and the fight against fake news are more important to us than ever. That fits in with what I did before at Microsoft: cybersecurity. Third, my job is to advocate for small and medium-sized businesses. This company really lives and dies with the middle class. We democratize access to advertising: around 25 million companies in the EU use our platforms to reach their customers, and around 180 million worldwide. But then there was Corona, Lockdown, a very heated election campaign in the US, George Floyd, then civil rights organizations got involved in the discussion about the role of our platforms, and then came the advertising boycott.

Many watchers have a very different Facebook image than the one you just drew. On Facebook you see a company that made a profit of 18.5 billion dollars in advertising last year and, therefore, deprived traditional media, as important institutions of a democracy, of sustenance, and that then fills this void with polarization and fake news. How do you deal with the fact that the company you work for also looks that way?

If you view Facebook from the outside and Facebook from the inside, then these are “two different pairs of shoes.” I think what we have to do even more and better is: communication, communication, communication. Of course, my job is also to speak with the public, with our clients, with our advertisers. We have a clear position on issues such as hate speech and misinformation. But our platforms, of course, are also a reflection of society. And not everything in society is positive. We now have more than 35,000 employees dealing with security issues. We have very good artificial intelligence (AI) that we use. And we invest four billion dollars in these issues every year. But with three billion people using our platforms every month and up to 150 billion messages a day, we will never find 100 percent of the content with hate speech.

Is Facebook “too big to manage”?

We are a young company. Facebook is only 16 years old and I come from a company, Microsoft, which was also very young when I entered. We have to learn to deal with this responsibility. But no one asked us to hire thousands of people just for security reasons. No one asked us to work with more than 70 independent organizations in more than 50 languages ​​to tackle fake news. No one asked us to create a so-called oversight board. We decided it ourselves in November 2018 to have an institution that really discusses critical issues with us and then makes decisions that we have to accept and implement.

Facebook grew extremely fast. And now everyone is wondering: where should regulation be done? Where have market mechanisms already weakened?

The Digital Services Act package is pending at the EU level. We welcome the new rules for the Internet, especially when it comes to protecting elections and dealing with illegal content. And we also participate constructively in the discussions. We have four areas in which we are particularly involved: hatred and agitation, data protection, data portability, and safe political elections. Of course, we are also expanding contacts in Brussels. We invest massively in employees who have an outside perspective.

What is the focus of your work?

The focus is on the customer area, especially SMEs, large advertisers and advertising agencies. And because you asked before what I had imagined differently when I accepted the job: I would not have imagined that, in the face of an advertising boycott, I would have numerous virtual appointments every day to explain to our clients what Facebook was doing in the area of ​​hate speech , for example. do everything.

Then we will stick with the boycott. How is the mood among advertisers?

We take the situation very seriously. There are many American clients, whose subsidiaries here in Europe are also affected by the boycott. The topic needs to be viewed in the context of the heated political climate in the US, and it’s an online marketing topic in general, not just about Facebook. But I also say that I do not consider a boycott to be the correct approach. My concern is this: we on Facebook are losing our image and confidence due to the boycott. I explain to our clients that we have zero tolerance for hate speech, but that we can’t completely avoid it when there are over a hundred billion messages a day. And what I also emphasize in the conversations is that it is difficult to objectively recognize hate speech in individual cases. This is easier with incorrect information; visibility in the feed is restricted. With hate speech you always have to look: in what context? Is it a satire in Holland? And is the same statement taken as an insult in Poland? Where is the dividing line between free speech and hate speech?

Businesses have now settled on this advertising boycott. And possibly not only because they fear that their advertising is close to hate speech, but because public pressure has become very high. The fact that Facebook does not adequately combat the problem of hate speech in the eyes of many shows that Facebook is too big to be managed.

We constantly improve. Globally, we removed around 22.5 million pieces of content from April to June 2020 for violating our hate speech guidelines. We now recognize nearly 95 percent of the hateful comments we remove before users report them; three years ago it was only 24 percent.

You intervene more and more in the content. Why is Facebook inconsistent, creating a publishing company instead of a normal company, and ultimately taking responsibility for content?

Our mission is to unite the people of the world so that everyone has a voice. We are not a media company. We give people channels and tools to exchange ideas.

What is the business model of the future of Facebook?

Around 180 million companies use our services and 171 million of them for free. Eight million pay less than five dollars a month to advertise, and with a million of these companies, big advertisers, we basically get our income. And where are we going? You have the most beautiful example on your doorstep in Zurich. We are firmly convinced that with Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality we have a cutting-edge innovation that will also make a difference in society, for example when employees can hold virtual meetings or when we can train people virtually, for example in the field of Surgery. And the technology that is being developed here in Switzerland is used in our Oculus glasses around the world. Furthermore, we are continually developing our existing platforms: We recently started having reels, short videos that can be edited with many effects and that can be created on Instagram; or we have stores through which each small business can offer products through Facebook and Instagram as in a virtual showcase. In the future, we want to connect stores to a checkout to place orders and payments. This is already available as a trial in the US and is coming to Europe soon.

How do you see the November elections in the United States and the federal elections in Germany next year? How would you act if Obama’s Facebook profile was hacked at 4pm on Election Day in the United States? Imagine addressing all African Americans with the message: “This election is a big scam. Stay at home! Don’t vote! “And as a result, Donald Trump would simply win the election.

Of course, we will immediately remove such contributions from the platform. Yes, there is always the risk of an account being hacked. But here we react with the power we have now.

You were at Microsoft when authorities took antitrust action against the software company. Today Facebook is in the sights of the authorities. Do you see any parallels with Microsoft?

In a company that only had to deal with the Cambridge Analytica case a few years ago and is now facing antitrust investigations, I’m trying to be a rock solid. At Microsoft we had similar developments around the year 2000. At that time, among other things, we had to untangle our browser. We were transparent and showed understanding. But on the other hand, we also drew the line somewhere and said: No, that is now the core of our company’s mission.

Is Facebook Going From Teen To Young Adult? And are you now, so to speak, the “adult in the room” on Facebook?

(Laughter) It’s good that Facebook has recognized this to some degree and brought in someone who has seen how a traditional company works at HP, for example, and who, through their work as a member of the board of directors, has understood what moves companies.

What are your plans in Switzerland?

We currently have space for 200 people in our Zurich office, and I would like to increase it even more. We have a great connection to ETH and we get great talent through them. In the field of computer vision, for example, ETH is a world leader with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

You can contact the head of technology department Christiane Hanna Henkel Twitter, Follow Linkedin and Facebook.