E.ON Joins Advertising Boycott of Facebook

German utility giant and Big Six supplier E.ON is joining a boycott of Facebook and Instagram in protest of the platforms’ tolerance of hate speech.

E.ON said it will suspend all ads, posts and activities on the social media channels, both owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, until further notice.

“At E.ON, we act in line with essential values, such as respect, diversity and tolerance. We expressly and resolutely oppose racism, hate speech and discrimination,” the firm said in a statement.

“We also expect this clear attitude from our partners. In this context, we consider it our responsibility to review our commitment and our role on Facebook and Instagram.”

In suspending its activities on Facebook, the energy company is joining the #StopHateForProfit campaign, launched by US civil rights groups following the death of George Floyd in police custody and waves of protests around the world.

More 500 companies, from Unilever to Coca Cola to Lego, have lodged protests against the social media giant for its lax attitude toward discriminatory posts and pledged to pause advertising on the sites at least through July. 

The campaign has taken issue with the platforms’ tolerate of far-right and racist hate groups and with U.S. President Donald Trump’s posts, including on from May which threatened that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” While competitor Twitter has flagged Trump’s posts for glorifying violence and promoting misinformation about voting, Zuckerberg has said that moderating Trump’s posts on Facebook would not be the “right reflex.”

The campaign, sponsored by the NAACP and ADL, among other organisations, has requested that Facebook and Instagram overhaul their policies and algorithms to prevent or bury hate speech, conduct a third-party audit of hate and misinformation, refund advertisers when their content is shown alongside discriminatory posts and hire a C-suite executive with civil rights experience.

However, Facebook VP of global affairs (and former leader of the Liberal Democrats) Nick Clegg insisted in an oped that the company, worth more than $650 billion, “does not benefit from hate” and said the tech colossus had taken action to stamp out biased posts. “Unfortunately, zero tolerance doesn’t mean zero incidences. With so much content posted every day, rooting out the hate is like looking for a needle in a haystack,” he wrote.

It’s unclear how large corporations’ flight from the platform will impact Facebook’s advertising revenue, which is largely driven by ads from small and medium-sized brands. While Facebook’s share prices crashed following the launch of the #StopHateForProfit in June, they had recovered by early July.

E.ON’s UK arm is one of Britain’s largest energy suppliers, serving around seven million UK homes, with a 13% share of the domestic electricity market and 11% share of the domestic gas market. German-owned E.ON is one of the world’s largest investor-owned utility companies, proving power to 33 million customers in more than 30 countries.

But while utility firms may be snubbing Facebook, Facebook isn’t abandoning energy. The company was the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the US last year, procuring 1.546GW of green power, or about as much as Google and Amazon did combined.