Leaders of the civil rights groups that recently launched an advertising boycott of Facebook reportedly stated that they were “disappointed” after a recent meeting with Facebook executives including CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Despite the advertising boycott, Facebook’s stock price hit a record high this week.
TechCrunch reports that leaders from the civil rights groups behind the recent #StopHateForProfit advertising boycott of Facebook stated recently that they were “disappointed” following a meeting with Facebook executives including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg.
Four leaders from the civil rights groups sat down with Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and Facebook’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox this week to discuss the boycott and what the groups’ leaders saw as issues of inequality and misinformation across Facebook’s platform. The meeting reportedly lasted for a little over an hour.
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt commented on the meeting stating: “Today we saw little and heard just about nothing.” He added that Facebook fails to apply the same “energy and urgency” to issues such as hate speech and misinformation on its platform as it does to scaling its massive online ad platform.
Rashad Robinson, the President of Color of Change, criticized Facebook for expecting “an A for attendance” just for showing up to the meeting. The co-CEO of Free Press, Jessica J. Gonzales, stated that she was “deeply disappointed” in the company. The President and CEO of the NAACP, Derrick Johnson, commented that Facebook was “more interested in dialogue than action.”
Despite what appears to be a failed meeting between Facebook and the civil rights groups, the social media giant’s stock price hit a record high despite the advertising boycott. Facebook’s stock price reached $245.50 per share on Tuesday, a new all-time high for the social media giant.
BMO analyst Daniel Salmon told clients in a recent note: “To be sure, the list of advertisers pulling Facebook spend (and increasingly, all social media, often including Twitter and YouTube) for the month of July is growing. However, with Facebook sporting 8 million+ advertisers and many direct response advertisers willing to spend more in ad auctions when others step away, we don’t expect the revenue impact to be material at this stage.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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