Facebook criticized for toothless 'PR exercise' following ad boycott

In the face of mounting advertiser pressure over its handling of hate speech, Mark Zuckerberg today met with the leaders of the NAACP, the Anti-Defamation League, the Free Press, and the Color Of Change. It did not go well.

With an ever-increasing number of business pulling advertising dollars from Facebook as part the #StopHateForProfit boycott, the social media behemoth's COO, Sheryl Sandberg, announced Tuesday the "need to take action." Unfortunately, according to the group behind the campaign that has grown to encompass massive brands like Unilever and Verizon, that action consisted of a meaningless "PR exercise" that resulted in "no commitment" from the Zuckerberg-helmed company.

So claims a scathing blog post published by Free Press following the meeting. According to Free Press Co-CEO Jessica J. González, Facebook — and by extension Zuckerberg and Sandberg — was all talk and no action.

"Facebook approached our meeting today like it was nothing more than a PR exercise," wrote González. "But boycott coalition leaders and advertisers understand that the #StopHateForProfit effort is about the lives, safety and freedom of our communities."

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At issue is Facebook's continued profiting off of white supremacy. As BuzzFeed News reported last week, Facebook has been for months taking money to run ads promoting racism and civil war.

SEE ALSO: Here are the (many) companies pulling their ads from Facebook

We reached out to Facebook for a response to Free Press' claims, but received no immediate response. We'd say maybe the company is too busy taking action to respond, but from all outward appearances that doesn't appear to be true.

UPDATE: July 7, 2020, 5:52 p.m. PDT A Facebook spokesperson provided Mashable with the following statement.

"This meeting was an opportunity for us to hear from the campaign organizers and reaffirm our commitment to combating hate on our platform. They want Facebook to be free of hate speech and so do we. That's why it's so important that we work to get this right. As a company, we have agreed to an independent civil rights audit which will be released tomorrow. We have invested billions in people and technology to keep hate off of our platform. We have created new policies to prohibit voter and census interference and have launched the largest voting information campaign in American history. We have banned more than 250 white supremacist organizations and are holding ourselves accountable by producing regular reports about our content moderation efforts. We know we will be judged by our actions not by our words and are grateful to these groups and many others for their continued engagement."