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Dear John,
A year ago today as a rising tide of disinformation, antisemitism, racism and other forms of hatred spread across major tech platforms, ADL and a coalition of civil rights organizations took decisive action. We launched Stop Hate for Profit, a wake-up call for Facebook and all of Silicon Valley that putting profits over people was inexcusable.
The Stop Hate for Profit campaign was the first time advertisers, organizations, advocacy groups and the public came together to send a message to Big Tech that they must put the safety of the billions of people who rely on them first, rather than the billions of dollars in revenue they rake in annually.
The campaign has been successful on many levels:
- Raising public awareness of the severity of the problem and the need for real reforms.
- Pulling together a broad coalition of civil rights groups, over 1,200 businesses, hundreds of nonprofits, marquee celebrities who drove over a billion social media views about Stop Hate for Profit and others who all shared the same goal: To insist Facebook stop profiting from hate.
- Driving other social media companies to speed up their pace in removing hate speech and disinformation.
- And most importantly, pressuring Facebook to start making changes ADL has urged for years. We believe many of the reforms Facebook has made over the last year can be ascribed to this pressure.
And yet, as you can see in our progress report, there’s still a lot more work to be done.
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Where Things Stand Now
Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform by far, has made the least progress toward meeting the Stop Hate for Profit coalition’s demands, but none of the platforms we tracked has made significant structural changes.
As our Online Hate and Harassment survey showed, the problem hasn’t lessened — 41% of Americans experience harassment online even though some companies have made policy changes.
But a policy change is only as good as its enforcement. We need enforcement at scale. We need bold structural changes, not incremental steps to reduce the torrent of hate and misinformation.
How to Take Action Against Online Hate
You can take action with ADL against the hatred that corrodes our online communities.
The efforts to curb antisemitism, racism and other forms of online hate by Facebook and other social platforms have been insufficient — band-aids instead of necessary larger institutional changes that still need to happen.
With your help, we will continue to insist that they Stop Hate for Profit.
| Sincerely, |
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| Jonathan Greenblatt |
| CEO and National Director |
| ADL |
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P.S. If you want the expert insights of our Center for Technology and Society on how to fight online hate and harassment, you’ll find our Fighting Hate Online newsletter fascinating. Subscribe today.
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