Pressure Intensifies on Facebook After Meeting With Civil Rights Groups and Audit

Jessica J. González of Free Press called the gathering 'a PR exercise'

The heat on Facebook over its failures to address widespread issues related to civil rights and hate speech on its platform shows no signs of cooling.

Civil rights groups, brands and marketing experts are still critical of the platform after findings of a 2-year-long independent civil rights audit released today showed that the social network has a lot more work to do.

On Tuesday, in an effort to head off the Stop Hate for Profit campaign asking advertisers to boycott Facebook, executives including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg met with representatives from four civil rights and industry groups behind the effort: the Anti-Defamation League, Color of Change, Free Press and the NAACP.

“They want Facebook to be free of hate speech, and so do we,” Facebook policy communications director Andy Stone said in a statement.

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