LONDON: Britain’s main opposition Labour party said on Sunday it has joined a Facebook advertising boycott over allegations that the social network has failed to sufficiently curb hateful content.

Hundreds of advertisers, including big-name consumer brands, have suspended advertising with the social media giant as part of the #StopHateForProfit” campaign.

“All MPs in the Labour party use Facebook to get across our message. But what we’re not doing at the moment is advertising on Facebook,” senior lawmaker Rachel Reeves told BBC television.

“And that is in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter campaign but also in line with what many businesses are doing this month, which is to express our concerns about the failure of Facebook to take down some hateful material from their platform.”

She said the company must “take more responsibility for the lies and propaganda that are sometimes put out there on Facebook... and take tougher action on hate crime and hate speech”.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg last week met organisers of the #StopHateForProfit coalition that is pressing for more aggressive action on hateful content and disinformation. The activists said they were disappointed and vowed to press on with their campaign which has grown to nearly 1,000 advertisers.

It was galvanised by the wave of protests around the world calling for social justice and racial equity in the wake of the death in US police custody of an unarmed black man, George Floyd.

Published in Dawn, July 13th, 2020