Zuckerberg Loses $7.2b As Companies Drop ads

According to Bloomberg's Billionaire Index, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has lost more than $7 billion in personal wealth since businesses ceased ads on the social networking site, and therefore dropped out as one of the three wealthiest individuals this week.  

Facebook shares dropped 8.3 percent on Friday, eliminating $56 billion from the company's market value, after British-Dutch consumer goods company Unilever joined a number of other major brands in pulling their advertisements off the site, according to Bloomberg.

Zuckerberg now ranks at No. 4 on the index with a net worth of $82.3 billion, behind Amazon creator Jeff Bezos, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and LVMH Moët Hennessy – Louis Vuitton CEO Bernard Arnault.

Companies spanning from Verizon to Ben & Jerry to The North Face are removing advertisements from Facebook and Instagram as part of the # StopHate4Profit movement organized by a range of civil rights organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League and the NAACP. Several companies have already received ads from Twitter.

The # StopHate4Profit campaign encourages companies to pull ads from Facebook specifically because they claim that the company amplifies white supremacist voices and does not do enough to stop hate speech from spreading.

The ADL on Thursday sent an open letter to Facebook advertisers saying the social media platform "continues to come up short" in its efforts to block "rampant hate and harassment."

"Every day, we see ads from companies placed adjacent to hateful content, occupying the same space as extremist recruitment groups and harmful disinformation campaigns," ADL CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt said. "Your ad buying dollars are being used by the platform to increase its dominance in the industry at the expense of vulnerable and marginalized communities who are often targets of hate groups on Facebook."

Facebook revealed on Friday several improvements to the way the company treats campaign propaganda and political content in the wake of criticism for not taking measures against US President Trump 's posts.

Facebook also said that its artificial intelligence tools and human moderators catch and remove "90 percent" of hate speech "before anyone even reports it" to the site.

“Often, seeing speech from politicians is in the public interest, and in the same way that news outlets will report what a politician says, we think people should generally be able to see it for themselves on our platforms," Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post. “We will soon start labeling some of the content we leave up because it is deemed newsworthy, so people can know when this is the case.”

Source: Fox Business