At the end of June 2020, a civil rights coalition, which includes the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the NAACP, launched the #StopHateforProfit campaign. This campaign calls upon major corporations to put a pause on Facebook advertisements, citing the company's "repeated failure to meaningfully address the vast proliferation of hate on its platforms". It is the result of over a decade of begging Facebook to do something about the hate speech problem. Facebook has allowed incitement to violence against protesters fighting for racial justice in America, named Breitbart News a "trusted news source" and made The Daily Caller a "fact checker" despite both publications having records of working with known white nationalists. They've turned a blind eye to blatant voter suppression on the platform.
While SimpleRisk is far smaller than many of the companies who have lent their names to this cause, we have historically focused a substantial portion of our advertising dollars on Facebook ads, and this is a cause that is very near and dear to our hearts. We feel that hate, in any form, should be stomped out and any platform that knowingly supports it is not a platform that we can support. We halted all advertising on the Facebook platform at the beginning of July to lend support to this cause. While the money we spend is just a drop in the $70 billion yearly revenue that Facebook makes from advertising on their platform, we feel that this is a worthwhile cause. We sincerely hope that Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg re-evaluate their policies towards enabling hateful content on their platform.
