Facebook execs to meet Tuesday with organizers of ad boycott
COO Sheryl Sandberg says the social network has made progress in removing hateful content but must get better.
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Sandberg says Facebook has spent billions of dollars on teams and technology to find and remove hate.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will meet Tuesday with organizers of the Stop Hate for Profit campaign, an ad boycott of the social network that has signed on hundreds of brands. In a post on Facebook, Sandberg said the company has made progress finding and removing hateful content but has a "big responsibility" to get better.
"We have clear policies against hate -- and we strive constantly to get better and faster at enforcing them," Sandberg wrote. "We are never going to be perfect, but we care about this deeply."
In June, a group of civil rights organizations including the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP and Color of Change, called on businesses to "hit pause on hate" and not advertise on Facebook in July. The social network makes nearly all of its money from ads, raking in more than $70 billion in revenue last year.
As of last week, more than 600 businesses and organizations had said they're pausing advertising on Facebook, including major brands like Unilever, Target, Coca-Cola and Verizon.
In addition to meeting with civil rights groups, Sandberg said Facebook on Wednesday will release the final report of its multiyear civil rights audit and will soon publish a diversity report that looks at the social network's workforce.
"We are the first social media company to undertake an audit of this kind," Sandberg wrote. "It has helped us learn a lot about what we could do better, and we have put many recommendations from the auditors and the wider civil rights community into practice."
