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What Can Brands Do About Social Media Hate Speech and Disinformation?

September 27, 2022 | by Tamar Terell
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How can companies combat the risks that hate speech and disinformation pose to their brand and marketing efforts? Click to learn more.

Ad spending on social media is projected to reach $226 billion in 2022. And it’s easy to see why. From 2020 to 2027, the number of people worldwide who use social media is expected to grow from 3.6 billion to 6 billion. And social media apps continue to grow in popularity and evolve. TikTok didn’t even exist six years ago. It’s hard to imagine a brand not having a presence on social media. Avoiding social means missing crucial opportunities to connect with customers, job seekers, and employees.  

But being on social media presents risks to brands. For one thing, being on a social app means essentially that a brand is renting space instead of owing it. If the app experiences a technical glitch or a security breach, there’s not a whole lot the brand can do about it until the app fixes the problem. Brands also need to play by someone else’s rules, including their approach to content governance – which creates a brand safety risk. 

Over the past few years, several controversies have engulfed social apps, which has put brands in an uncomfortable position. For instance, in 2021, Meta experienced a bruising hit to its reputation when former Facebook employee Frances Haugen alleged that the company values growth and profits over combating hate speech, misinformation, and other threats to the public. And this was not the first time Facebook was stung by an expose. In 2020, more than 1,000 brands joined a boycott organized by the Anti-Defamation League and NAACP to protest hate speech and disinformation on the platform. The action led Facebook to make commitments that it is still working on, like standing up brand safety tools in News Feed and auditing its community moderation reports. 

It stands to reason that no brand wants its content appearing alongside harmful information and hate speech. At the same time, brands continue to find their preferred social apps at the center of the storm of public controversy. A few widely reported examples have once again called attention to the fragility of brand safety. For instance: 

  • The Washington Post has published a series of articles (including this one) about a hate group, Libs of TikTok, which perpetuates dangerous and wrong information about LGBTQ+ people and supporters of LGBTQ+ youth, including the false belief that LGBTQ+ people groom youth. And the account has fomented growing harassment of hospitals for providing care to transgender youth. Libs of TikTok relies on Facebook and Twitter as its primary social media platforms to spread hate speech. But neither Facebook nor Twitter has banned Libs of TikTok although both apps have suspended the account temporarily only to reinstate it. (TikTok has banned the organization.)  
  • Facebook has once again faced scrutiny. A recent report from the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit tech watchdog, found 119 Facebook pages and 20 Facebook groups associated with white supremacy organizations. Facebook continues to serve ads against searches for white-supremacist content, such as the phrases Ku Klux Klan and American Defense Skinheads. 
  • Reddit continues to struggle with the proliferation of hate speech, including members who share homophobic and racist information and opinions, according to Time. According to the article, Reddit’s content moderators lack the expertise and capacity to find and combat hate speech, especially at an international level, where moderators are less qualified to recognize hate speech in context of local cultures.  

Of course, these stories put brands in a wildly uncomfortable position. What can they do? Not a whole lot. But they do have options, such as: 

  • Leave social media. That’s what Lush did in the aftermath of Frances Haugen’s allegations. But this is an unlikely option for most businesses. Social media is just too big to ignore. For almost all brands, the benefits of social outweigh the downside. 
  • Pressure the platforms to do a better job fighting hate speech. This can be achieved in a number of ways ranging from the Facebook boycott cited above to pressuring apps behind the scenes. There is a lot that apps can do, too, but they’re still trying to figure out how to combine human judgment with artificial intelligence to root out hate speech. Moreover, brands can pressure the platforms to enact stricter governance policies. 
  • Monitor sentiment from all their stakeholders, including employees customers, and job seekers. Is the brand facing any pushback for advertising on a platform that’s being called out? A critical stakeholder confronting a brand could pressure a brand to reconsider its social media presence.  
  • Periodically assess the brand’s policy and strategy for being on social media. Assess the benefits of each app against the brand’s own tolerance for the risks that these apps pose – a consideration that should include factors not discussed in this post, such as security and cost of advertising on each app. 
  • Make sure the brand’s protocols for crisis management are understood and agreed upon. How will a brand respond it controversy caused by a social media affects the brand, too?  

Social media will always be a messy place to live. So far, most brands are accepting this reality. Can they do more? 

Contact Investis Digital 

Informed by user research, trend monitoring, and content analysis, we seamlessly connect your social efforts to your overarching marketing strategy through our social media practice. To learn how to level up your social media strategy, contact us.