Derrick Johnson to Boycott Facebook

NAACP’s Derrick Johnson, in the midst of leading a corporate boycott against the largest social media company, on Monday told CNBC that Facebook should be a place for targeting ads but not targeting hate.

“It is a platform. It is a useful tool to target ads,” the CEO of the civil rights organization said on “Closing Bell.” “It should not be a useful tool to recruit individuals to participate in white supremacy, and use racial hate speech, gender hate speech, antisemitic speech, and other harmful speech that target individuals and can cause harm.”

Johnson, who is leading the “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign on the social networking giant alongside the Anti-Defamation League and Color of Change, made the comments ahead of a meeting Facebook has scheduled for Tuesday with representatives of the organizations.

More than 400 corporations, including the likes of Coca-Cola and Starbucks, have joined the effort by pulling their ad spending on Facebook and Instagram — the popular picture app owned by Facebook — starting July 1. Clorox, Ford, Microsoft, and Verizon are other companies that have stopped carrying their ads on social platforms.

Facebook and its Security

Facebook has come under scrutiny for its stance on what kind of content is deemed acceptable, especially when it comes to political ads, on its website at a time when competitors like its smaller rival Twitter have taken a more aggressive approach to limit the spread of misinformation online.

The company said it would review its hate speech controls on top of plans to label newsworthy content that may violate policies.

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Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has been cautious to censor certain information on the website in favor of protecting free speech, and other top brass are scheduled to meet with leaders of the aforementioned civil rights groups on Tuesday where the organizations plan to press the founder on their list of demands to curb hate speech and harassment from spreading on the web.