terça-feira, 12 de janeiro de 2021

Facebook loses $60billion in market value in two days as advertising boycott continues despite Mark Zuckerberg's attempts to backtrack on hate speech

Facebook's market value dropped by roughly $60billion Monday morning as stock prices slid for a second day
It shook off the loss with a 1.2 percent gain Monday afternoon
The social media giant is facing pressure as a long list of companies pull their advertising
Starbucks and Ford are among the latest to join the movement tired of Facebook's inaction on racist and violent posts
The list of companies pulling their advertising grows despite attempts by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to do a u-turn on the company's hate speech policy
He announced policy tweaks Friday that included labels for 'harmful' posts from public figures

PUBLISHED: 22:16 GMT, 29 June 2020 | UPDATED: 22:49 GMT, 29 June 2020

e-mail

226

View comments

Facebook erased almost $60billion from its market value Monday after a massive two-day stock decline as more advertisers joined the boycott of the social network.

Stocks in the world's largest social media platform rose 1.2 percent again Monday afternoon after shaking off a loss earlier in the morning.

The social media giant is facing a defection of advertisers tired of the racist and violent posts spreading through the social network.

Among the long list of companies are Starbucks, who have halted advertising on all social-media platforms.

Facebook reacted Friday with policy tweaks but the boycott list keeps growing.

Facebook cut its market value by $60billion in two days despite CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday announcing policy tweaks that it hoped would appease advertisers tired of the social media giant's inaction on posts containing hate speech on its platform

Starbucks on Sunday announced it is cutting advertising from all social media

Pepsi is among the companies that has pulled its advertising from Facebook

A long list of companies have pulled advertising from Facebook Inc in support of a campaign that called out the social media giant for not doing enough to stop hate speech on its platforms.

The Stop Hate for Profit campaign was started by several U.S. civil rights groups after the death of black man George Floyd in police custody triggered widespread protests against racial discrimination in the United States.

Facebook makes an estimated $70 billion annually from ads, the coalition claimed in a statement on the ADL website.

The campaign has criticized Mark Zuckerberg's decision to not moderate the U.S. president, in particular, after the Facebok CEO defended his decision not to limit Trump's often controversial, incendiary and inaccurate posts.

Starbucks on Sunday joined the list of big companies saying it will pause its advertising on all social media.

The U.S. coffee chain said it would pause advertising on all social media platforms while it continues discussions internally, with media partners and civil rights organizations.

On Monday, Ford also put the brakes on all national social media advertising for the next 30 days.

The company said hate speech and violent and racial injustice content need to be eradicated from the sites.

Other companies in the boycott include Pepsi, Unilever, Adidas, Coca-Cola, HP, Lululemon, Clorox and Verizon.

As the first round of pulled advertising began to be announced Friday, Facebook was hit with a 8.3 percent loss in its stocks.

Stocks in Facebook recovered slightly on Monday afternoon after a two-day slip saw it cut $60billion from its market values. It comes as more companies join an advertising boycott

It worsened Monday morning as stocks reopened after a weekend of other companies adding their names to the list.

Facebook has responded to the advertising boycott by introducing policy tweaks, a step-back from its earlier stance that it is not the place of a private company to intervene with what's posted on its site.

Zuckerberg buckled under the pressure Friday and announced new content policies for the platform, including tighter restrictions on advertising and labels for 'harmful' posts from public figures.

The platform announced that it will ban a wide range of hateful language and label ads about voting with links to accurate information.

The GOP appeared to be one of the first to face the clampdown on 'harmful' and 'hateful' content, after Facebook put a warning label on a video posted by the RNC about 'left-wing anarchists' Friday.

Zuckerberg also said in a Facebook Live video Friday that company would begin labeling 'harmful' content from politicians that remains 'newsworthy'.

Facebook put a warning label on a video posted by the Republican National Committee about 'left-wing anarchists' after CEO Mark Zuckerberg caved Friday and said the social media giant would ban hate speech on the platform following a boycott by 100 advertisers

Facebook pulled a Trump ad over 'hate' policy breach

Loaded: 0%

Progress: 0%

0:00

Play

Skip

Current Time0:00

Duration Time1:45

Fullscreen

Need Text

Though he did not name Trump, the policy comes in response to a campaign demanding Facebook impose tighter restrictions on 'misinformation' in the president's campaign ads, and on his inflammatory posts.

Twitter has already slapped warning labels on some of the president's tweets that it deemed abusive or threatening, and unlike Facebook, Twitter banned all political campaign ads.

Zuckerberg slammed the move when Twitter first labeled a Trump tweet, saying it wasn't up to social media companies to be the 'arbiters of truth' - but the Facebook CEO appears to have had a change of heart following the punishing advertiser boycott.

'We will soon start labeling some of the content we leave up because it is deemed newsworthy, so people can know when this is the case,' Zuckerberg said in the livestream.

'We'll allow people to share this content to condemn it, just like we do with other problematic content, because this is an important part of how we discuss what's acceptable in our society - but we'll add a prompt to tell people that the content they're sharing may violate our policies,' he continued.

Yet it doesn't appear to satisfy the critics who say Facebook has profited handsomely by allowing unfettered speech on its site.

Zuckerberg said in a Facebook Live video on Friday that the company would begin labeling 'harmful' content from politicians that remains 'newsworthy'

Facebook's Zuckerberg announces fight against racism and voter suppression

Loaded: 0%

Progress: 0%

00:00

Play

Skip

Current Time00:00

Duration Time13:17

Fullscreen

Need Text

However, Daniel Salmon, a BMO Capital Markets analyst, noted that Facebook has 8million advertisers and the current boycott would not significantly hurt its revenue.

He told Business Insider that pressure to invest in safety and security would have the bigger financial impact the social media site in the coming years.

Facebook's market loss comes as Reddit announced Monday that it had shut down a forum for supporters of Donald Trump amid an overhaul of its content policies as Amazon's live-streaming platform, Twitch, also announced that it had temporarily banned the president's channel for 'hateful conduct'.

According to Reddit, it has banned about 2,000 subreddits, the majority of which were inactive.

The list included The_Donald and the left-wing forum ChapoTrapHouse. The_Donald forum housed more than 790,000 users who share content in support of Trump. The ChapoTrapHouse has more than 160,000 users.

The site's new content policy said communities and users that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability would be banned.

Reddit said Monday that it had shut down a forum for supporters of Trump amid an overhaul of its content policies. Reddit said The_Donald community was banned for violating site rules

Also on Monday, Twitch said it had temporarily banned Trump's channel over its hateful conduct policy. The notification above pops up in the search for Trump's channel

And according to Reddit, The_Donald forum has consistently broken the site's rules by allowing people to harass others with hate speech.

Also on Monday, Twitch said it had temporarily banned Trump's channel over its hateful conduct policy.

'Hateful conduct is not allowed on Twitch. In line with our policies, President Trump's channel has been issued a temporary suspension from Twitch for comments made on stream, and the offending content has been removed,' a Twitch spokeswoman said,

One of the streams identified by the spokeswoman was a rebroadcast of a 2016 Trump rally in which the president said Mexico was sending rapists to the U.S.