On Wednesday, reverse mortgage lender Open Mortgage pledged to suspend its Facebook advertising for the month of July in solidarity with the Stop Hate For Profit campaign.
The multi-channel mortgage lender stated in a release that it stands with the campaign created as a response to the social media company’s failure to address the proliferation of hate and misinformation on the platform.
“At Open Mortgage we believe better is possible,” said Scott Gordon, founder and CEO of Open Mortgage. “By withholding our money, we want to convey that we do not condone racism and inspire reform.”
Stop Hate For Profit asks corporations to pause advertising on Facebook and Instagram for July 2020 to garner the attention of the social media giant, and demand that it addresses racism across its platform, the release said.
The campaign was created by a number of civil rights groups including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Color of Change, the Anti-Defamation League, Free Press, Common Sense Media and Sleeping Giants.
“We hold firmly to the hope that positive change will happen when we stand together for what is right,” Gordon said.
Other industry corporations that pledged themselves to the campaign were Realty Works Group and Ashby & Graff Real Estate – the latter of which pulled its five-figure Facebook ad budget in January of 2019.
“It was really years’ worth of actions by the social media company that forced us into this position of considering how we’re participating in such a problematic platform,” said CEO John Graff. “So, we ultimately decided in January 2019 to stop advertising there completely.”
On Friday, Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg shared a post to his personal page on the platform highlighting new policies the company would be enforcing in terms of the fight on hate speech.
“Today we’re prohibiting a wider category of hateful content in ads. Specifically, we’re expanding our ads policy to prohibit claims that people from a specific race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, gender identity or immigration status are a threat to the physical safety, health or survival of others,” Zuckerberg said.
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