The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which is one of the oldest American civil rights organizations, has turned down a donation it received from Facebook and is encouraging a week-long boycott of the social network starting December 18.
This boycott has been requested in the light of a report released earlier this week, which found that Russian hacking of the 2016 election was heavily targeted towards African-Americans.
“Facebook’s engagement with partisan firms, it’s targeting of political opponents, the spread of misinformation and the utilization of Facebook for propaganda promoting disingenuous portrayals of the African American community is reprehensible,” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said in a statement.
In a tweet, the Congressional Black Caucus signaled its willingness, writing, “Last year we met with Facebook & other tech companies about this issue. If they can’t stop the weaponization of their platforms, then Congress will.”
“They have too much power over our democracy and over our economy for them not to be fully held accountable,” said Color of Change President Rashad Robinson, calling for “a full accounting of how the race was weaponized inside this last election.”
“Our decision to return the donation to Facebook and logging out of the platform for a week is to bring attention to Facebook ‘s failures in protecting the integrity of both our privacy and our vote,” the NAACP’s Johnson said. “It is crucial that we bring awareness to the fraudulent and inflammatory ads placed on Facebook, the data privacy mishaps, and the damaging impact on African-Americans.”
Tech giants, especially Alphabet’s Google, have increasingly come under scrutiny from many human rights groups that believe that the platforms pose major threats to the values that such groups seek to uphold.
