Groups put Facebook under the microscope
Tech giant under pressure as internal audit finds flaws in its approach to discrimination
Canadian advertisers and civil rights groups are watching closely to see what actions Facebook will take following the public release on Wednesday of an internal audit that found the company hasn’t done enough to fight discrimination on its platform.
The audit, conducted by independent lawyers Laura Murphy and Megan Cacace, found that although Facebook has instituted some improvements, it has also made several decisions that represent serious setbacks for civil rights.
In June, a number of U.S.-based civil rights groups, including Free Press and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, launched the “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign, which urges businesses to halt advertising on Facebook and its Instagram subsidiary. They want the company to take meaningful steps against hate speech and misinformation, such as the appointment of a C-suite executive with civil rights
experience. Several hundred companies across the U.S. have signed on to the campaign and they have more recently been joined by major Canadian advertisers, including the Big Five banks — Royal Bank of Canada, TD Bank Group, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Bank of Montreal and Bank of Nova Scotia — as well as Vancouverbased outdoor brands Lululemon, Mountain Equipment Co-op and Arc’teryx.
Chatham, Ont.-based TekSavvy, which provides internet, phone and television services to 300,000 subscribers in Canada, joined the campaign on Wednesday following the audit’s public release.
Mike Stanford, the company’s vice-president of marketing, says the decision to indefinitely suspend ad spending wasn’t made lightly given that up to 40 per cent of Teksavvy’s online campaign budgets often go to Facebook and Instagram. But management has been growing increasingly wary of the social network in recent months, especially with COVID-19 misinformation and anti-Black Lives Matter rhetoric spreading.
“The challenge for us, and me as a marketer, is putting the TekSavvy brand on a platform where there are untruths and hate speech that isn’t being controlled or flagged,” he said.
Canadian civil rights groups say they are watching closely to see how Facebook reacts to the audit report, as well as to existing promises of improvements. The Ontario Human Rights Commission and Canadian Human Rights Commission, for example, last year asked the company to reform its advertising platform, which they say facilitates discriminatory housing, employment and credit advertising.
Facebook responded by saying it would put new measures in place by the end of this year to ensure these types of ads can’t discriminate based on factors such as age, gender or postal code.
“The OHRC will be reviewing the audit and its recommendations in order to assess how it relates to Facebook’s steps to address discriminatory advertising, as well as for other potential issues relating to Ontario’s Human Rights Code,” said Rosemary Parker, manager of communications and issues management at the OHRC, in an email.
Facebook’s chief operating office Sheryl Sandberg acknowledged that the company has much work to do in a blog post accompanying the audit’s release. But she also said the company is in a “better place today than we were two years ago,” having made improvements in fighting voter suppression and building a more diverse workforce. The company also says it is spending billions of dollars a year to keep its platform safe for users.
“The investments we have made in (artificial intelligence) mean that we find nearly 90 per cent of hate speech … before users report it to us, while a recent EU report found Facebook assessed more hate speech reports in 24 hours than Twitter and YouTube,” a spokesperson for Facebook Canada said in an email. “We know we have more work to do, and we’ll continue to work with civil rights groups … and other experts to develop even more tools, technology and policies to continue this fight.”
Some observers don’t believe the business boycott will have much effect on Facebook, which earned almost $70 billion (U.S.) in advertising revenue last year, nor is the company likely to independently solve its own problems.
A 2018 study released through the Ottawa-based Public Policy Forum, titled “Poisoning Democracy,” suggested the creation of a multi-stakeholder commission that would be responsible for crafting a set of rules and tools to govern all social media content, similar to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council that oversees radio and TV.
“There’s been no headway on that, no one has really picked it up,” said Fenwick McKelvey, an associate professor of communication studies at Concordia University who co-authored the report. “It’s being addressed more in the United States, (but) we will need to have that conversation in Canada.”