- Details
- Published on Friday, 31 March 2017 01:45
- Written by editor
Hey A,
Have you heard? Our message reached all the way up Facebook's ivory tower to Mark Zuckerberg. Our long journey and persistence proves just how powerful and influential we can be when enough people speak up...in total, over 250,000 of you!
Last August when Baltimore police killed Korryn Gaines and injured her 5-year-old son Facebook set a dangerous precedent by removing her live broadcast videos at police request.
Over 500,000 people signed petitions to send Facebook a clear message. Together with our friends at Daily Kos, Center for Media Justice, and Color of Change we sent Facebook a public letter signed by 80 organizations to lift up your voice and demand more transparent and accountable content censorship policies.
And Facebook wrote us back.
In October, Facebook's Global Head of Policy Joel Kaplan was forced to send a formal response to your demands. Major news outlets like The Guardian and Reuters covered our correspondence with Kaplan, and our growing movement to bring Facebook's censorship policies to light.
Our combined petitions racked up over 570,000 signatures from people around the world, all calling on Facebook to change their censorship policies and their compliance with law enforcement. We delivered these petitions to Facebook last month, following Mark Zuckerberg’s post about building global community.
In his statement, Zuckerberg mentioned our campaign work several times, including in this paragraph:
"In the last year, the complexity of the issues we've seen has outstripped our existing processes for governing the community. We saw this in errors taking down newsworthy videos related to Black Lives Matter and police violence, and in removing the historical Terror of War photo from Vietnam.”
Our message permeated all the way to the top of Facebook's HQ, so we know Zuckerberg is paying attention.
But this work isn’t done. In the Trump era, it’s more important than ever that people can freely post coverage of protests and not have their data turned over to police, here and across the world. And in Zuckerberg's suggested plan, the company could further expose vulnerable minorities to violence, harassment, and censorship.
So our fight isn't over yet. In fact, we have filed a shareholder resolution against Facebook coming this summer to give Zuckerberg greater accountability to the board. While the work continues, I wanted to report back to you and thank you for speaking up, because your voice matters. Sometimes it feels like signing a petition can have questionable impact, but often the petitions you sign are part of strategic campaigns — and having big numbers of people forces petition targets to listen to our demands. And it worked here, Facebook heard you.
Thank you for your hard work on this. Our work against corporate power grabs is far from done.
Thanks for all that you do,
Reem, Nicole, and the team at SumOfUs
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More information:
2016: the year Facebook became the bad guy, The Guardian, 12 December 2016.
Mark Zuckerberg: Building Global Community, Facebook, 16 February 2017.
SumOfUs is a community of people from around the world committed to curbing the growing power of corporations. We want to buy from, work for and invest in companies that respect the environment, treat their workers well and respect democracy. And we’re not afraid to stand up to them when they don’t.
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