Starbucks appears to be considering leaving the platform after receiving a large number of negative comments regarding some of its posts on racial and social issues.
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In internal discussions, Facebook employees who manage the social network's relationship with Starbucks said the company has become so frustrated with hate and bigotry on the platform that it may remove its page. If it does, it would be the first company of its size to leave Facebook's platform.
“Starbucks is in the process of evaluating its organic presence on FB and whether it should continue to have a presence on the platform,” a Facebook employee wrote to colleagues earlier this week. “Whenever it posts related to social issues or its mission and values (e.g. BLM, LGBTQ, sustainability/climate change, etc.), it is inundated with negative/insensitive hate-related comments.”
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The employee went on to note that Starbucks’ community management team has struggled to moderate negative comments and cannot disable them on its page. He also relayed a series of questions to Starbucks management, who sought to understand how Facebook’s algorithms moderate or boost comments on posts.
Starbucks’ reassessment of its Facebook presence comes amid a broader assessment of the hate and misinformation that continues to proliferate on the platform. Last week in the United Kingdom, the Premier League and its 20 affiliated football teams boycotted Facebook and photo-sharing app Instagram for four days in an effort to raise awareness of the ongoing racist abuse faced by players on those platforms.
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Last year, Starbucks was one of hundreds of companies to stop advertising on Facebook as part of the “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign, which sought to pressure the world’s largest social network to take a tougher stance on racist comments and hateful content on its platform.
Starbucks spokeswoman Sanja Goulddid not confirm whether the company was actually considering removing its Facebook page, but said the company is "against hate speech."
In a statement, Facebook spokesperson Dani Lever said the company offers “tools to limit this content from appearing on partners’ pages, including ways for businesses to control who can comment on their posts.”
