| Friend,
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is a coward. He’s standing with white supremacists, racists and fascists on the wrong side of history.
It’s time for Facebook to: Enforce its own policies and ban users, including the president, who refuse to follow them. Root out fake Black Lives Matter and antifa accounts that call for violence. Remove hateful ads. If Mark Zuckerberg can’t put human rights first, he should resign.
Where even Twitter has taken some steps in the last week to disrupt President Trump’s unabated spread of misinformation and threats of violence against Black protesters, Zuckerberg is taking phone calls with the president and offering up weak justifications for leaving up the same content.
Tensions within the company are mounting. Over the weekend, Facebook staff began speaking out on Twitter about their disdain for Facebook’s shameful apathy. On Monday, a virtual walkout was organized.
It’s time for Facebook to enforce its own policies. White supremacists are supposedly banned from the platform and yet report after report shows that they’re leveraging the site to recruit, organize and raise money. The company supposedly doesn’t allow language that urges violent action and yet Trump’s incendiary commentary remains up.
Facebook’s racism needs to stop: Take action now.
Zuckerberg has attempted to quell this internal tension by offering weak explanations for the company’s decisions, organizing video calls with civil-rights leaders and donating $10 million to groups working on racial justice.
Of their discussion with the CEO on Monday night, Vanita Gupta of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP and Rashad Robinson of Color Of Change said that Zuckerberg “did not demonstrate understanding of historic or modern-day voter suppression and he refuses to acknowledge how Facebook is facilitating Trump's call for violence against protesters.”1
And Zuckerberg’s $10-million donation amounts to just 0.012% of his net worth. Wealth redistribution is a critical part of achieving racial equity, but when it’s offered up in lieu of taking the actual steps that would stop the spread of violence, racism and hate, it’s not enough.
Enough with the empty promises. Demand that Facebook enforce its own policies and take immediate action to stop white supremacists and deplatform Donald Trump.
White-supremacist groups and so-called “accelerationist” groups have been recruiting for their horrific causes by exploiting first the coronavirus pandemic and now the protests against ongoing police violence and executions of Black people like George Floyd.2
On top of all this, Facebook is profiting off the Trump campaign, which spent over $20 million on Facebook ads in 2019.3
In the last week — in the midst of a global pandemic — protesters have flooded the streets in more than 140 cities across the country to speak out against police violence and to fight for racial equity. Police have met these protests with more violence.
This is a systemic problem that requires systemic solutions. Disrupting the spread of organized hatred and misinformation needs to be part of the solution. Urge Facebook to enforce its own policies and ban Donald Trump and other white supremacists from its platform.
Onward,
Candace, Nilda, Jessica and the rest of the Free Press Action team
freepress.net 1. “Civil-Rights Leaders Blast Facebook After Meeting with Zuckerberg,” Axios, June 1, 2020 2. “Far-Right Extremists Are Hoping to Turn the George Floyd Protests Into a New Civil War,” Vice, May 29, 2020 3. “One Year Inside Trump’s Monumental Facebook Campaign,” The Guardian, Jan. 28, 2020 |
