Facebook has been hemorrhaging advertisers after a campaign drew attention to pages on the social media site that promoted violence against women. Women, Action, and the Media launched the campaign to encourage Facebook to end hate speech on its site and urge advertisers to pull their support.
The campaign produced more than 5,000 emails to Facebook advertisers and more than 60,000 posts on Twitter from supporters. Women, Action and the Media said that 15 companies agreed to pull advertising over the matter.
Facebook responded by saying that it will review its guidelines, update training for employees and increase accountability for those who post such material, along with working more closely with women’s groups. “We need to do better — and we will,” Marne Levine, Facebook’s vice president of global public police said in a statement online.
Women, Action and the Media’s Executive Director Jaclyn Friedman noted that they’d been concerned for a while about inappropriate content, but decided to try a different approach by reaching out to both advertisers and Facebook. “We are thrilled with the commitment (Facebook) made,” Friedman said. “It’s about stepping up and being the industry leader that they already are.”
Two of the larger advertisers that responded, Nissan and Zipcar, say they will resume advertising on the social network because of steps Facebook is taking to fix the problem.
