- Facebook is publishing the results of its two-year civil rights audit on Wednesday.
- But the company won't be making all of the changes that the audit calls for, COO Sheryl Sandberg says.
- Facebook is facing an unprecedented advertiser boycott over its approach to hate speech, and intense criticism from civil rights leaders.
- It's not clear whether the changes Facebook makes will be enough to satisfy the company's critics.
Back in 2018, Facebook announced it would undergo a civil rights audit led by Laura Murphy and law firm Relman, Dane and Colfax to examine the company's impact on communities of color. The audit's final report is due to be published on Wednesday, amidst an unprecedented advertisers boycott over Facebook's approach to hate speech.
But Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said Tuesday that not every change it recommends will be carried out.
"While the audit was planned and most of it carried out long before recent events, its release couldn't come at a more important time. 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," Sandberg wrote in a Facebook post. "While we won't be making every change they call for, we will put more of their proposals into practice soon."
It's not yet clear what specific recommendations Facebook plans to reject.
Reached for comment, a Facebook spokesperson pointed Business Insider to a number of changes that the company is making — including an audit of monetization policies and brand safety controls for advertisers, updates to its quarterly disclosures about rule-breaking content to include more information on hate speech, and joining the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, an ad industry body that works on brand safety issues.
Sandberg's comments, however, raise the possibility that the changes Facebook makes will not be far-reaching enough to satisfy civil rights leaders, who have been intensely critical of the social network and helped to organize the boycott, which runs throughout July.
The Stop Hate For Profit coalition behind the boycott has separately issued a list of demands — including appointing a c-suite-level executive "with civil rights expertise to evaluate products and policies for discrimination, bias, and hate"; regular third-party audits of Facebook examining hate speech and misinformation; refunds to advertisers whose ads appear next to hate speech; the removal of white supremacist groups, fact-check political advertising; allowing users who have been harassed to speak to a live Facebook employee, among other changes.
Hundreds of high-profile brands have paused their advertising on Facebook (and sometimes other social media platforms) in response to the boycott — from Coca-Cola to Unilever and The North Face. It's the largest advertiser action against the company in its history, but it remains unclear what its lasting impacts will be. In an internal meeting, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he expected advertisers to return to Facebook in due course, and insisted that he wouldn't make changes in response to financial pressures, The Information reported.
Sandberg echoed this in her post, arguing that any changes Facebook makes are not because of the boycott. "We are making changes – not for financial reasons or advertiser pressure, but because it is the right thing to do," she wrote.
"We have worked for years to try to minimize the presence of hate on our platform. That's why we agreed to undertake the civil rights audit two years ago."
Sandberg, Zuckerberg, and other senior leaders at Facebook are also meeting with the organisers of the Facebook boycott on Tuesday, as well as other civil rights leaders, Sandberg added.
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See Also:
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