Several celebrities, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Kim Kardashian, will freeze their Instagram accounts for a day, Wednesday, to call Facebook, its parent company, to better fight on its platforms against hate content and disinformation.
These personalities, including actress Jennifer Lawrence and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, responded to the call of a group of organizations already at the origin of a first movement to boycott Facebook.
At the end of June the collective, which includes the association for the defense against anti-Semitism Anti Defamation League and the organization for the defense of black rights in the United States NAACP, had launched the keyword #StopHateforProfit ("Let's stop hate at the service profit ”).
Several major Facebook advertisers had temporarily given up buying advertising space on social network platforms.
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The collective accuses the group of playing a role in
"inciting violence, spreading racism, hatred, and contributing to disinformation relating to the electoral process
,
"
ADL said in a statement.
"I cannot remain silent as these platforms continue to allow the dissemination of hate, propaganda and disinformation,"
wrote on her Twitter account Kim Kardashian, who will also freeze her Facebook page.
Rapper Kanye West's wife is one of the world's most followed people on Instagram.
“Misinformation can do damage,”
wrote American comedian Kerry Washington.
“It's up to us to do the research and make sure we're sharing the correct information.”
In early July, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with representatives of the movement, who demanded ten immediate measures.
The leader had only agreed to one of them, namely the appointment of a high-ranking leader with experience in the civil rights movement.
The representatives of the movement had decided to continue their action, including this call to boycott Instagram on Wednesday, launched to all Internet users, companies, celebrities or influencers.
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The group of nine associations asks Facebook in particular to increase the resources allocated to the fight against hateful content, or to withdraw false information related to the US presidential election.
In August, Facebook announced that it had deleted some 790 accounts linked to the QAnon movement, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory.
In early September, the platform also announced a tightening of its rules on political advertising.
A documentary recently released on Netflix in the United States, entitled The Social Dilemna, notably involves the engineers who helped create these communication tools, whether Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
They, now repentant, shed light on the deleterious role played, according to them, by so-called “social” networks in the democratic and electoral process, and call for profound changes, which they believe require collective awareness, but also by more important regulation.
Otherwise, prophesy the most pessimistic among them, the future of our democracies and of humanity itself would be at stake ... What in any case to fuel reflection.