"Let's send Facebook a powerful message: Your profits will never be worth promoting hate, bigotry, racism, anti-Semitism and violence," states the website for the Stop Hate for Profit campaign.
 
The campaign has been picking up steam with a variety of major brands, including outdoor clothing brand The North Face, consumer goods giant Unilever and telecom leader Verizon. This week, Sony, Clorox, Adidas, Ford, Denny's, Volkswagen and Microsoft were among the brands that announced they've joined the boycott too.
"This definitely seems more widespread," said Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer's principal analyst. "I don't think I've ever seen this level of marketer action around Facebook."


Here's what you need to know about the ad boycott:
Why is this campaign happening now?

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said his organization and other civil rights advocates have been pushing Facebook to do more to make the platform safer for many years. Still, the company hasn't been acting quickly enough, he said.

Hate speech on Facebook helped fuel a genocide in 2017 against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. In 2019, a gunman used the social network to livestream the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand.

"To be frank, we've not yet seen enough meaningful change," Greenblatt said.

The lack of progress became even more apparent to civil rights activists in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man in Minneapolis whose death sparked nationwide protests about police brutality and racial justice. Conspiracy theories and misinformation about Floyd's death spread on social networks, including false claims that Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros orchestrated the protests. Some of this misinformation popped up in private Facebook groups that are harder to moderate.

Facebook has also included Breitbart News, a far-right site, as a "trusted" source in its news service, and right-wing news and opinion site The Daily Caller is one of the company's fact-checking partners. Facebook has been used to incite violence against protesters and to suppress voting.