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Civil-rights leaders met with Facebook’s leaders this week to present a list of demands to get the publishing giant to remove hateful messages from its platform. Rather than satisfaction, they say Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg gave them platitudes and spin.
I am shocked, shocked that these two titans of Silicon Valley pressed nuance over action. The next day, Facebook released the results of an outside civil-rights audit. Unsurprisingly, the auditors found Facebook to be a denizen of hateful speech. Sandberg says the company is on a “journey” to improve that.
This isn’t a new trip. It merely is getting to be a marginally less pleasant one for Facebook. Perhaps mindful that next week is when Fortune would have gathered in Aspen, Colo., for Brainstorm Tech, I re-watched a powerful speech from last summer by Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League and one of the activists who met with Facebook.
The video still resonates. Greenblatt called for audits. He called for the so-called social-media companies—I call them publishers—to stop profiting from hate. (That theme has been picked up in the current campaign to convince advertisers to boycott Facebook.) He also made the most powerful point of all: Facebook, at the end of the day, is just a business. It can ban whatever it likes, as surely as a burger joint or a hotel would toss out someone spewing hateful filth.
Here’s how I see all this playing out: Congress will fulminate but do little. Facebook will do just enough to give the appearance of change. Advertisers will set aside their wokeness when they think they can get away with it, and return to Facebook, because it’s a really effective place to advertise.
Adam Lashinsky
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Aaron Pressman.
