Well, at least they walked away “disappointed.”
That would be the race-stoking groups whose focus is to divide Americans according to color, gender and religion. They all practice intimidating, coercive tactics to force compliance with their demands, which always align with a radical progressive agenda.
The company that disappointed them — surprisingly — is Facebook. Top executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, met with groups like the NAACP, Color of Change, and the Anti-Defamation League to discuss whether the company would submit to their ultimatums – with their nebulously-defined demand to “stop hate speech” as their theme.
The organizations marched into the online virtual boardroom of the social media giant under the umbrella of one of those collaborative-sounding names that make them sound bigger than they are – this one is called “Stop Hate for Profit.” They would be more appropriately called “Stop Donald Trump.”
You see, Facebook has billions of dollars in revenues. Zuckerberg said earlier this year he would refuse to censor President Trump’s (and all political candidates’) posts on his site. Trump – the extortive groups’ icon of “hate” – is up for re-election this year. He must be stopped, and thus any one and any organization aiding and abetting him must be shamed, canceled, defunded, abused, torched, toppled, looted, and/or shot.
So the idea is to inflict as much pain as possible until Zuckerberg says “Uncle” and mutes the President’s campaign messages, which Trump delivers quite effectively on Facebook.
Despite Zuckerberg’s assurance earlier this year that Facebook would not censor or fact-check posts of political candidates, his content moderators have different ideas. As Project Veritas recently exposed in interviews with company whistleblowers, many who review the posts allow progressive views to stand with minimal scrutiny, while they put greater limitations on conservatives.
“If someone is wearing a MAGA hat, I am going to delete them for terrorism,” said one moderator.
Liberals have whined about Facebook’s alleged political speech freedom all year, as National Legal and Policy Center has reported, even though its liberal rank-and-file content moderators still censored conservatives. And now, after all the pressure, Zuckerberg has moderated his public posture on political speech, saying in late June that all “rule-breaking” posts by politicians — including Trump — will be labeled as such. And Bloomberg reported last week that Facebook is considering a complete ban on political ads in the days leading up to the Nov. 3rd election, further diminishing the President’s get-out-the-vote strategy.
Still, progressives see Trump has the upper hand in social media success and want him further neutralized. As a result, “Stop Profit for Hate” has used the George Floyd moment (Rahm Emanuel: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”) to press Zuckerberg to accede to its demands. They organized a large-scale boycott by major corporations to cease their advertisements on Facebook for the month of July. Nearly 1,000 companies participated, according to the Hollywood Reporter, including Ford, Microsoft, Pepsi, Adidas, Starbucks, Hershey’s, Pfizer, Verizon, Coca-Cola, Honda and Unilever.
And (maybe not so) coincidentally, last week the ACLU also released the results of a two-year “audit” of Facebook’s policies and practices, applying additional progressive pressure.
“We have also watched the company make painful decisions over the last nine months with real world consequences that are serious setbacks for civil rights,” the audit states, noting specifically that Trump’s posts aren’t “fact-checked.”
Laura Murphy, the ACLU’s audit report author, said to Associated Press, “When you elevate free expression as your highest value, other values take a back seat.” I guess she hasn’t heard of the First Amendment to the Constitution.
“Many of our critics are angry about the inflammatory rhetoric President Trump has posted on our platform and others, and want us to be more aggressive in removing his speech,” said Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs and communications, after a series of meetings with some of the advertisers.
It is in this context that the organizers of “Stop Hate for Profit” – Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, Color of Change President Rashad Robinson, and NAACP President Derrick Johnson – hoped in their online meeting that their advertiser boycott would pressure Zuckerburg and company to meet their demands.
And the demands are absurd, even for the sympathetic Facebook executives. As outlined in condensed form by Edward Ring of American Greatness, they include:
Establish and empower permanent civil rights infrastructure including C-suite level executive with civil rights expertise to evaluate products and policies for discrimination, bias, and hate . . . submit to regular, third party, independent audits of identity-based hate and misinformation with summary results published on a publicly accessible website . . . find and remove public and private groups focused on white supremacy, militia, antisemitism, violent conspiracies, Holocaust denialism, vaccine misinformation, and climate denialism . . . create an internal mechanism to automatically flag hateful content in private groups for human review . . . ensure accuracy in political and voting matters by eliminating the politician exemption.
“Any one of these measures should terrify anyone hoping to preserve any sort of open public square,” Ring wrote. “Put a commissar into Facebook to monitor content? Allow outside content auditors? Censor ‘climate denialism’? Monitor private groups? Prevent politicians from uttering campaign rhetoric? This is tyranny.”
Even a company with a progressive-minded CEO like Zuckerberg would be foolish to cede that much control to outsiders.
And it appears he didn’t give them anything in their discussion last week – hence their “disappointment.”
“Today we saw little and heard just about nothing,” said Greenblatt, the Anti-Defamation League CEO.
In a separate meeting with Facebook employees, according to tech website The Information, Zuckerberg reportedly shrugged off the boycott.
“We’re not gonna change our policies or approach on anything because of a threat to a small percent of our revenue, or to any percent of our revenue,” he said, also adding, “My guess is that all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough.”
And several financial analysts reported that they expected the boycott to be “a big nothing.”
Meanwhile Facebook’s share price closed on Friday at $245.07, an all-time high. Zuckerberg may be willing and able to censor Trump, but he’s going to do it his way.