If you can't beat 'em, censor 'em...
That seems to increasingly be the rallying cry of Silicon Valley's left-leaning (understatement, we know) social media giants after Twitter recently announced plans to ban RT and Facebook is apparently now considering the same with Breitbart.
According to a report from Business Insider, Facebook said they're "looking into" calls to cut off Breitbart advertising on their social media network after an "anti-Breitbart, online activist group Sleeping Giants" logged repeated requests demanding such actions.
Facebook said Thursday that it's looking into calls to cut off the far-right website Breitbart from its ad network.
The confirmation to Business Insider comes after an email from Facebook marketing VP Carolyn Everson was sent Wednesday to members of the anti-Breitbart, online activist group Sleeping Giants.
Since late last year, calls to blacklist Breitbart from ad networks have been rallied by the anonymous Sleeping Giants group, which shared the recent email from Facebook's Everson acknowledging the complaints with Business Insider.
That said, luckily it's not all bad news. After assuring Sleeping Giants that Facebook "proactively" and "reactively" reviews ads to make sure content complies with "Community Standards or Audience Network policies," Facebook's marketing VP, Carolyn Everson, also reminded the activist group that "publishers whose content you may disagree with may be allowed to continue within the Audience Network"...which we suspect may be considered a microaggression and/or outright hate crime but we're still awaiting confirmation.
Thank you for raising this issue. The concerns of both your organization and advertisers are incredibly important to us.
We give advertisers control over which publishers their ads appear on. That's why we recently announced pre-campaign transparency, so advertisers can see where their ads may run. They can also block any site or app they don't want their ads to run on.
However, it's important to remember that not all disagreeable or unpopular speech violates our Community Standards or Audience Network policies. Publishers whose content you may disagree with may be allowed to continue within the Audience Network. We review all publishers on the Audience Network both proactively when they sign up and reactively as they run ads through the Audience Network to make sure they are not in violation.
I respect your feelings on Breitbart and I would encourage any concerned advertiser to use the tools outlined above to control where their ads are showing across the Audience Network.
Meanwhile, and not surprisingly, the Sleeping Giants organization immediately took to their Facebook page to vehemently criticize the social media giant for not promptly banning all content which ran counter to their own liberal belief system.
Carolyn Everson, the Facebook executive responsible for BRAND SAFETY is responding to members of our community to deny that Breitbart is hate speech under Facebook Community Standards.
This means three things:
1. Facebook has finally responded to us. We've only been knocking on their door for over 6 months (!!!!!!)
2. Facebook must have a very questionable idea of what hate speech is, certainly different from the 3300+ advertisers who have proactively blocked Breitbart already.
3. This one's really important: This is evidence for advertisers, marketing agencies and media buyers that they cannot rely on Facebook to place their brands responsibly across the Facebook Audience Network.
Breitbart is a litmus test. If Facebook doesn't budge on them, we can be certain that Facebook's brand safety measures are effectively, a lie.
http://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php
Of course, if a mere $100,000 in Facebook ads was enough to disrupt the presidential election of the largest democracy in the world then banning Breitbart should presumably be enough to tip the scales of future democratic elections to be permanently in favor of the Democrats...so there's kind of a lot at stake here.