 Hi, welcome to the future of democracy, a show about the trends, ideas and disruptions changing the face of our democracy and her host Sam Gill. You got to think of the show as the op-ed page of our contemporary democracy. It's where we hear different views, different debates about some of the really critical issues that are challenging our democracy or that are showing the way forward. And we're going to continue to talk this week about social media and democracy. There is a growing sense that social media has at least become a friendly haven to, if not accelerant of hate speech and other discriminating forms of expression. And this summer, the most successful ad ban in history, Stop Hate for Profit, convinced major brands including Unilever, Ford and Coca-Cola to pull ads for 30 days from Facebook. Our guest today helped orchestrate the campaign. He's no stranger to pressuring corporations around social issues. He's Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change, and I'm really excited that we'll have a chance to talk to him, not only about this campaign and why it was so uniquely successful, but how he sees the work continuing in seeking to change the world that social media plays our democracy. So please join me in welcoming the show, Rashad Robinson. Hello. Good to see you Sam. Good to see you. Thank you for being here. Of course. So let's start with, we've now got a little bit of the benefit of hindsight, which I think there's sort of some good and some bad in thinking about this campaign but let's start with the good and this really was this wasn't the first ad moratorium. For one of the major platforms, it was easily the most successful in the most visible. Why, what do you what do you think made this work this year. Well, a couple of things I think it made it work. First of all, the timing, we were in a moment where they were unprecedented number of eyes looking at screens and major corporations and brands were asking what they could do around racial justice and racial equality. Corporations had been reaching out to us. They were making statements. And then they were watching as Facebook was allowing for hate and division to be so on its platform. These corporations had their own challenges also with Facebook, they were dealing with a company that did not have to make changes because they didn't have competitors. And so as a result, many of these companies felt in this weird kind of catch 22 in their relationship with more kind of rocking a hard place in their relationship with Facebook and so it was the perfect sort of set of all those things but really for us as the social justice organizations and particularly for us a color of change, which was calling Facebook for since 2015, and had been over time working to push this company to do various things had been on the inside, pushing had went before and pushed Congress and, and legislators to do things had been constantly trying to make movement, the boycott and represented sort of us as like a final straw, really recognizing that we if we didn't bring more public attention and more public awareness to the issue, we would continue to spin our wheels with a company that wasn't incentivized to change. And what do you think the campaign achieved you had a lot of access in some key moments. Were you able to extract concessions that you and your, your allies see as meaningful. I mean, a couple of things. So first, you know, we, a color of change had demanded that Facebook do a civil rights audit and we had, and we've gotten them to commit to doing a civil rights audit after they had turned off the Facebook live of a black woman in Baltimore who was having a police interaction. They turned it, please ask Facebook to turn it off without any proper sort of protocols they turned it off she ends up dead. Her name is Korean gains. And what ends up happening as we demand that they do a civil rights audit and as they're asking what they can do and then they start kind of oftentimes as they say they're going to do something and then it doesn't actually happen. And when Mark goes before Congress the first time we work with Senator Booker to have him asked specifically about the civil rights audit and civil rights issues. At that point Mark does commit to doing the civil rights audit now publicly in a more public forum before the United States Senate but what ends up happening is once again more slow walking, more pushing. And then the New York Times reveals that Facebook while this was happening had hired a PR firm to attack us. We found out because the New York Times called us after they had published a story to get comment. And so we're now trying to sort of navigate this this ends up with us moving from meetings at the policy and staff level to meeting moving to meetings at the policy suite level and in our first sort of face to face sit down with Cheryl, Sam Bird the COO where Mark stopped in for a little while, we get Cheryl to commit to releasing the civil rights audit publicly. And later that month they released the first phase of the civil rights audit which really showed the company to no surprise hadn't done much. They hadn't actually done much on that audit they were slow walking so it was a bunch of things that they do, not things that they had done even though the audit had been apparently taking place for about a year. And then over the course of the next six months I will be honest and say that Facebook really did lean in. I mean, pun intended in some ways Cheryl took over the took over the audit and she was in deep contact I was in regular contact with her in her office we brought her to Atlanta to meet with black activists and activists from the Muslim and Jewish and other communities to hear firsthand about the impacts of this platform. We got them they started making announcements around banning white nationalist groups around sort of political ads and right before that sort of forum in Atlanta. They are policy director announces of almost what seemed like a surprise to Cheryl and her team that they were going to have an exemption to some of these policies particularly on political speech. And hey, you know, and so we started to call it the Donald Trump exemption we were surprised, we put all this time and having this forum and then we were sort of blindsided the day before. And this, but we kept we said at the table once again. So this, now we've been publicly attacked, then we like do this forum we've been sort of kind of publicly surprised but at each turn we're continuing to push, because we don't have the government levers to actually get the type of oversight and an enforcement necessary and so we know that we actually need to do some things so we don't end up in the same position as we were in 2016. Around the election and how the platform was used to weaponize all sorts of attempts to suppress the vote against black communities. And so we continue to work, and we continue to get policies in place and we continue in these back and forth meetings. And then Donald Trump starts testing these policies. Whether it was the voter suppression policy whether it was a process policy about inciting violence. So whether it was lying about voting and vote by mail whether it was that looters and shooters post at the height of the Floyd uprisings. We watch as Facebook doesn't enforce the policies that they had put in place that at every turn they find a reason why they can enforce it and the policies go through the decision to enforce it goes through their policy department which is charged with putting a relationship in DC which is very different than the way that those decisions are made at Twitter and Google and other places around these decisions and so we have been in a lot of back and forth and in June 1. Along with Sheryl and Eiffel from the legal defense NAACP legal defense fund and Vanita Gupta from the leadership conference on civil rights and met with Mark, Sheryl, Joe Kaplan who is kind of Brett Kavanaugh's best friend and was the policy director and we met over zoom around these posts. At the end of the meeting I knew that the work that my team had been doing around building out what could look like an ad boycott was the only way to go because once again we're on this call and we're being sort of explained civil rights by Mark Zuckerberg about why these things don't violate the policies about why they shouldn't be enforced about why it wasn't a mistake. And I realized that we weren't in the right conversation that we were asking for someone to do something that wasn't incentivized to do it. And we needed to make this conversation much more public we needed to move it out of the behind the scenes conversations and move it into a much more public space. And that's how we got here and I think what we achieved. And I think what we always knew that we wanted to achieve was putting this conversation on the map in a new way right I did a set of black radio this morning, specifically on the street. And each of those conversations they asked me about Facebook and our work around Facebook. That did not happen six months ago. This is on the radar of people in a new way as a result of over 1000 brands joining us. Social justice warriors and big corporations who no one would call social justice warriors, coming together to say this platform has to do something different. They're not doing something different than continuing to lead like like kind of defend their positions, even while they made some modest changes at the edges. I think also sends a powerful message in a new conversation. Yesterday, the report came out or this week the report came out from Congress on anti trust, and I did a press conference with Congressman Sicilini, the chair of the subcommittee, and each of these places those this kind of campaign this stop hate for profit campaign is actually being used as an example another talking point another sort of line to show why real reform and real change is necessary. I don't agree I mean I think I think that if to the extent that success is about, I think one bringing to the surface in corporate speak concerns about brand safety and making that part of the political discussion. I would agree that the campaign did that and I certainly agree with you that something that's definitely shifted. I think over the past six months, is that the, the discussion about content, the lawyers like to call kind of lawful but awful is now a lot more specific, we're talking in part about content that is lawful but race lawful but hateful. It's lawful in a generalized way it's different than I just don't like the tone of the discourse online I think the recognition that that there are some communities who are victimized, and a much more fundamental and pervasive way by the speech that the internet's being instrumentalized for that purpose has made a difference and of course, you know, coven has made a difference to I think I think, I think a sort of corporate liturgy around unbridled free expression just feels a lot emptier in a world where it's actively trying to find accurate information about coven on social media platforms, I guess the question though is, so you've changed the discourse, we're still sort of careening toward the abyss, you know, like where do we, where do we go from here. You know, this is the, this is the trick that we're in right we've got to win the right level levers of power to be able to put infrastructure in place to set new rules and to then enforce those rules. You know, one thing Facebook kept saying things that they couldn't do around enforcement around content moderation. And I remember sort of in the early days when we're all going into quarantine. And there was a lot of misinformation and disinformation about COVID, you know, some people may not remember this because it feels like we've lived a couple of years over these last couple of months. But in the early days of COVID there was a lot of disinformation online that black people couldn't get COVID, like black people like we're somehow immune to COVID in some way. And a lot of that was all related to lagging indicators around how like people had actually access to healthcare and had access to doctors and so a lot of the ways in which this conversation was being driven was was online and a lot of misinformation and then disinformation was like, you can use lupus drugs to cure COVID and black women are disproportionately more likely to have lupus so we watch lupus drugs flying off the shelves and then people not getting access. I talked to Cheryl and what Cheryl Samberg and I one thing I was like just encouraged by and also like then a little outrage by was all of the great work that Facebook was doing to deal with misinformation and disinformation around how they had moved all of these forces how they had coordinated it was almost sort of like military style in terms of their ability to be able to coordinate resources and deploy resources because they saw this was a problem. They coordinated with the World Health Organizations. They did all of this work to like make sure they were dealing with this information and she walked me through it and it was deeply encouraging. And all I could think was this was the same stuff that she told me they couldn't do like technically just a couple of months before which is just a recognition of power right of where of how incentive structures work inside of corporations. What people tell you they can do is oftentimes not actually what they can do, but what they will do what they are willing to sacrifice what they're willing to put on the line. And even you know two hours before the debate I was in communication with you know senior level people at Facebook about the Donald Trump junior post on Facebook that calls for an enlistment of an army of Trump supporters to deal with voter fraud. And that is happening. I tried to help them the same way that I did around that looters and shooters posts. Also point this back to the history of vigilante sort of attacks on black communities, the suppression of black people's political voice the violence that we have faced that if you read history books or seen documentaries is as clear as day. I got an email back a couple of hours before Donald Trump was on a national stage telling the proud boys to stand by defending and parsing enlist and army and what he really meant and knowing full well that if we had the right level of power I wouldn't be in that conversation. They are more afraid right now of regulation and attacks from the administration, then they are of the impacts of their platforms on the safety of our communities. And until we build the right level of power whether it's through government or whether it's through commerce or whatever else and commerce is deeply hard when you have a monopoly. I'm going to continue to be in this situation where we're making demands on a system that are moral righteous demands where we don't have the right incentive structure because moral and righteousness doesn't outweigh profit and growth. So imagine that there is regime change in November in a pretty profound way. If, if Democrats retake the Senate and the White House, this will not be low on the list of issues, technology. What, what, what are some of the rules that you think are need to be the top priorities to, to ultimately begin to produce a more just social media in your view. There's a couple of things. First, there are agencies already that sort of have lacked the, the sort of teeth and to enforce what they should be enforcing to oversee what they already should be doing. And so the FTC is one place that's dealing both with the fact that, you know, Facebook has 60%. Facebook has 75% of the messaging market. They are controlled by one person. They have a chairperson and CEO who makes all the decisions with over 2.6 billion users that has more followers than Christianity. So the fact that we're using rules that largely were created before Facebook existed to sort of keep it accountable doesn't mean that we have the type of muscular rules that hold it accountable. So FTC, which has been weak and even when it has put sort of rulings down, hasn't either been able to enforce it or has find Facebook at the level of, you know, what, at the equivalent of what, you know, a piece of candy might cost my niece and has not actually in any way cost Facebook or prevented Facebook from wanting to do it again. And so, you know, what we're now dealing with is those agencies. But to be clear, right, we have been here before in this country, where new industries had grown and consolidated, and we needed infrastructure to keep us safe. You know, we don't rely on the auto industry to be the sole sort of ambassadors about whether or not the seatbelts work, but we have regulations and we have rules and we have oversight enforcement. We don't rely on our meat on the meat industry alone to determine whether or not the meat that comes into our homes are safe. And so I do think, you know, similar to what's been done, you know, at the consumer level with the CFPB. We need an agency that is robust and has sort of the ability to both enforce rules, have a real civil rights perspective, as it relates to new tools that come down the road, you know, we've watched as these platforms have argued that they are not accountable to civil rights law. Right, so not only do they make their products without black and brown people in the room, then they also then go around saying that they're not accountable to civil rights law. I remember, at the height of the pandemic, all of the, I shouldn't say the height of the pandemic, that's, that's not really fair, but in the early days of the hitting our shores here in the United States, I would, we were dealing with a whole host of zoom bombing that was happening, attacking black and Jewish and other sort of gatherings. And when I got on the phone with, and I guess I got on the zoom with the leadership at zoo, and they, you know, said to me when we would never imagine that people would want to interrupt someone's gathering. And I'm like, of course you never imagine it because you didn't have people around the table who have a history and experience with their gatherings being interrupted. And so, you know, to the extent that we need enforcement and rules to oversee new tools, we need accountability on it and then we need the like right level of certification for who gets to build these tools right. There's a lot of city, there's a lot of buildings. There's a lot of people who were, who have architect or engineer in their title who built these things. And if they fail, those engineers are held accountable for the failures of what they built for how they've hurt people. People go out to Silicon Valley and have the ability to build all sorts of things that impact our lives but don't have to be accountable to any set of rules. They don't have to be responsible if the tools that they built or the sort of infrastructure that they built hurts us. The technology that has the potential to bring us into the future shouldn't drag us into the past. What, what might a certification that's an interesting idea what might a certification regime for for this kind of engineering class look like. So I mean I think that you know we certify lawyers we certify doctors I think that there are sort of, it would probably include some, some, some tested evaluation, it would include a set of ethics that people have to sort of abide by, and if they don't have a regulatory body that sort of can, you know, take their sort of license or their bar certification or whatever else. The fact that we have certifications for so many different jobs. And right now, the future, our literal future is built by people who don't have to be certified should make all of us worry because what we know will happen is that the capitalist forces of making money at all expense will outweigh some of the questions about the safety civil rights that can sometimes slow things down, but actually allow for all of us to fully participate, allow for those tools not to hurt harm and target people. And so I do think that those are the case I also want to say that there's a lot of smart people sort of talking about this and thinking about this in a range of different ways. And one thing that I'm always struck by is that when the tech companies and tech go before Congress how much how in in after our members of Congress can sometimes look when they're asking questions, you know, they bear you like our legislative body of ever being a net. Exactly. And they'll say things about, you know, an Android product when it's really an Apple product, maybe ask and I've sometimes been in rooms where I've been like talking about sharing platforms and I've been, you know, having to just educate the lawmaker how to get on the platform and find their password. But I say all that to say that I don't expect my the people in Congress to be necessarily experts on nuclear power. I expect us to build the infrastructure so that we do have folks that are experts and I expect the lawmakers to recognize how do we evaluate their effect in this how do we evaluate their safety, but you know we don't elect our elected officials to be expert on every single thing that the government has to oversee or that the things that impact our lives. What we want them to be able to do is recognize at scale the infrastructure that we need to ensure safety and to ensure our democracy and an economy that we can all participate in. So just keep pushing on this a little bit. I mean, one of the things that strikes me about the examples that you gave, which I think are great examples of places where we have, you know, both regulatory infrastructure and professional ethics. In the examples of like a developer, a lawyer, a doctor, absolutely there are incentives to cut corners. And so you do need professional codes that make clear what the ultimate interest is. But there's also kind of broad consensus between the practitioner and the consumer about what success looks like like the building standing is a success for both the building falling is a failure for both the patient. You know, healing is success for both the patient getting sick or dying is a problem for both. And when I listened to say, like Mark Zuckerberg when he's interviewed and ask questions about harm that might be obtaining on the platform. You know, there's still kind of a discourse that it's net beneficial that there's sort of more good happening, because we can personalize the content because we can connect you to more people, because the connection is there all the time. And, and I can't tell, you know, whether the sort of engineering class that you want to target with the certification system actually fully embraces the idea of a good social media of a functioning social media that you're necessarily espousing. Yeah, I mean this is all the more reason why we have to do it right if the industry was all on board, then we may not actually need it the same way. You know, police don't actually want new rules either, but we need systems and structures. And even if there is a net benefit, right, that also can't be the sort of like the kind of ground in which we stop. We have to think about sort of all the ways in which those net benefits can slowly be chipped away if we don't actually deal with the challenges in an increasingly diverse and increasingly divided society. The fact of the matter is is that a lot of folks in Silicon Valley want you to believe that they've designed tools that are not biased that these tools have been designed in ways that are just sort of like, you know, building on data and data is not biased. And what I know, right, from living uptown in New York, right, let's just talk about it at the sort of micro level of like policing, for instance, right. So I live uptown in New York, a stone's throw away from Columbia University a stone's throw away from Central Harlem. No one can tell me that there's not just as much drugs being done on Columbia University's campus as there is in Central Harlem. But we know if we just looked at arrest records on drugs, we would have a whole theory about what was happening in terms of people's drug use, right, on Columbia's campus versus in Harlem, that actually then could be extrapolated into all sorts of models that tech companies use, and it could hand off to law enforcement that could then do predictive policing, could then use those things to deny people access to housing through Airbnb that could deny people access to credit could these models were then used to determine whether or not someone was getting marketed certain jobs or certain housing on Facebook until we worked through the Fair Housing Coalition ACLU and others to sort of push back on that and so I say all of that to say that we will have to build some consensus and that will be the hard work. I wish this was going to be easier than it will be, but part of the reason why we're here right is because we've gotten so far down the line building tools and systems without a civil rights perspective in mind without a sort of perspective about the harms and damages, and now we've got huge platforms which have dictates so much of our day to day lives, and these platforms are continuing to grow. And, and as a result, you know so many of us are continuing to face the sort of damage the consequences of their growth without those tools. Do you see the social movement that you've started to tap into broadening. Well yeah I mean look, it's it's incredible I mean a couple of weeks ago we did a brief pause with on Instagram just another thing as we're keep building you know I am not confused that we're, you know around what we can actually do to damage Facebook sort of online right now they are insulated in a lot of ways that they're set up, but what we have done is we are creating broad consensus among the public. We are, we have given Mark Zuckerberg in these companies, many of opportunities that come to the table and actually be good players are moving things forward. I bet you if they had taken more of an opportunity to fix some of the things, it would be a lot harder for us to get so many people on board so many companies during these campaigns, so many celebrities, so many folks on board so many elected officials, but because of their unwillingness, because they have been so focused on growth like, you know, like the like the railroads of the days before, like so many of the other companies that had to be dealt with. I do believe that we can simply take old sort of models of just breaking things up or just doing this. I do think we need new rules for a new day, but I do fundamentally believe that we need rules and I believe that we are changing public perception, and now we have to channel that awareness and that visibility and that awareness into actually changing the rules and so that's where it gets tough. That's where we're going to lose some people here and there that's where we're going to be in deep fights, but you know, I actually believe that the sort of a racial democracy like ours is an experiment. And if we're not willing to put rules in the row that allow for our voices to be heard and for us to participate and engage, then we're not going to then we're not serious about making this experiment work. So just a last question before I let you go. And it's a it's a version of a we got a question on the chat about whether you're continuing to have dialogue with advertisers and I guess the question would meet to me along the lines of what you just said is, you know, will will will brand advertisers be a force in this campaign for change for new rules and a threshold that will matter like you alluded to this getting to thresholds that matter for these companies is really hard, you know, once the NCAA said we're not going to have a championship in a state with a Confederate flag. That was one state that had to worry about at that point that you could reach a threshold of advertiser anxiety that work North Carolina around the you know the bathroom bill quote unquote you're able to reach an advertiser threshold that had an impact. Advertisers linking arms with you in this in this effort going forward. Um, you know I think that this is going to be a but this this remains to be seen we're going to invite as many of the advertisers in, you know, as someone who's got some successes and a lot of wounds from doing corporate accountability work. I never sort of I never count on a whole set of companies being in the long term game of regulation and accountability they are all incentivized to having rules that allow them to operate without accountability. At the same time, you know the business to business nature of Facebook and the ways and the arrogance of this company which has grown so large and doesn't feel like they have to listen to feedback. The fact that we could continually show big brands their ads right next to organizations that were calling for a second Civil War. Um, you know I think did spark their energy, how far they go down the road of setting new rules remains to be seen. But I do think that we are in a place where we where Facebook becomes the biggest champion for our efforts because continually day in and day out. They have an infrastructure that's not incentivized to set rules, and they their business model comes directly up against the things that corporations and the users want. And now we've got to sort of make the next steps and I think your point about making the sort of regulations and rules matter. It's so important the last thing we would want is to have a victory lap around a set of rules that don't change the context and experience that people are having on the platform. You can follow Rashad on Twitter at Rashad Robinson you can follow color of change on Twitter at color of change or at color of change.org as always will send this out to you after the show Rashad thank you so much for joining us today. Appreciate you thanks in. Alright folks, we've got some some good shows coming up in the coming weeks on October 22. We'll be hearing from Zed up to fetch a professor at University of North Carolina and kind of modern Nostradamus on questions technology and covert. And October 29 will be hearing from Kristen Clark president and executive director of the Lawyers Committee for civil rights under the law. As a reminder this episode will be up on the website later you can see this episode and any episode on demand at kf.org slash fd show. You can also subscribe to the future of democracy podcasts on Apple Google Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. One day later audio only you can email us at fdshow at camp.org or you can reach me on Twitter at the Sam Gill. Please stay for 30 seconds to take a two questions survey we always appreciate your views, and we will end the show to the sounds of Miami singer songwriter Nick County, you can check out his music on Spotify. Until next week thanks for joining us stay safe.