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MORE THAN ONE THOUSAND companies of all sizes—ranging from Verizon to outdoors retailer REI to hundreds of small business and nonprofits—have signed on to the Stop Hate for Profit campaign, a movement led by the ADL and NAACP asking companies to pause Facebook advertising to protest what the civil rights organizations see as Facebook’s failure to fight hate speech. “Your profits will never be worth promoting hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and violence,” the campaign argues. Yet many of the biggest brands participating in the boycott fund websites that promote as much or often more of the content that these advertisers don’t want to fund on Facebook.
Over the past four months, companies including Pfizer, Microsoft, Starbucks and Target placed advertisements—probably inadvertently, through algorithms that determine where programmatic ads appear— on sites that NewsGuard has rated Red, meaning generally unreliable. (NewsGuard rates websites for credibility and transparency to give readers more context for the news they see online.)