Stop Hate for Profit

Stop Hate for Profit is a civil-society coalition campaign launched on 17 June 2020 via a Los Angeles Times advertisement, organized by six advocacy groups: the Anti-Defamation League, NAACP, Color of Change, Free Press, Common Sense Media, and Sleeping Giants. The campaign called on major corporate advertisers to pause paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram for July 2020, demanding the platform fix its AI-driven recommendation and moderation systems that the coalition documented as amplifying hate speech, racism, antisemitism, and disinformation. The immediate trigger was Facebook's decision not to moderate Donald Trump's posts about shooting protesters during the George Floyd protests — content the coalition argued violated Facebook's own policies and exemplified years of algorithmic moderation failure.

Demands

The coalition presented a nine-point demand list organized around accountability, decency, and support for harassment victims. Core demands addressed the algorithmic layer directly: stop recommending or amplifying content from groups associated with hate or misinformation; commission independent audits of Facebook's content-moderation algorithms; establish a C-suite civil rights executive empowered to evaluate products and policies for discrimination; create a dedicated moderation pipeline for users targeted on the basis of identity characteristics; and automatically remove ads from content later labeled as misinformation or hate. Two demands addressed advertiser accountability: refund brands whose ads had appeared adjacent to hate content, and notify advertisers when their ads were displayed near subsequently removed content.

Scale and outcomes

At peak, over 1,200 businesses and nonprofits joined — approximately 1,100 advertisers, including Unilever, Coca-Cola, Verizon, Starbucks, Target, Ford, The North Face, and Ben & Jerry's. Facebook's stock dropped 8.3% on 26 June 2020. Facebook's concessions included establishing a VP of Civil Rights position, creating a dedicated team to study algorithmic racial bias, banning Holocaust denial content in October 2020, adding warning labels on certain posts, and removing Boogaloo movement and QAnon accounts. Six of the nine demands remained at red status. Facebook's quarterly revenue ($21B+) showed no significant dip during the boycott period. The campaign expanded internationally by late June 2020. In January 2021 the coalition led calls to deplatform Donald Trump across social platforms following the Capitol attack. The campaign is ongoing.