Starbucks is seriously thinking of leaving Facebook as it is upset with the hateful comments that have been left on its posts on issues related to race and social justice. Buzzfeed News has seen internal discussions of a Facebook employee who has written that the largest coffee company in the world is tired of dealing with the hate and may remove its Facebook Page. If it does so, it would be one of the largest pages to leave the social network.
The Starbucks Page has 35 million followers. According to the company’s annual report, it spent more than $258 million on its worldwide advertising campaign, last year.
Earlier this week, a Facebook employee wrote a note to their colleagues who said that Starbucks was in the procedure of evaluating their organic presence on Facebook and the company was considering whether it should even have a presence on the network.
The employee added that Starbucks was overwhelmed by “negative/insensitive, hate speech related comments on their posts” whenever they put posts related to social issue or their mission values such as BLM, LGBTQ, sustainability, climate change and more.
The note added that the company was struggling to moderate its page and wanted to understand how Facebook’s algorithms moderated comments on posts on the Starbucks Page.
The Verge reported that Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts by the Premier League and 20 associated soccer teams, were shut down in the United Kingdom, from 3 p.m. on Friday, April 30 to 11.59 p.m. Monday, May 3. This social media boycott was a response to the ongoing and discriminatory abuse that many players and others who are connected to the game have been receiving online on social media networks.
When asked if Starbucks was considered a removal of its page on Facebook Sanja Gould, a spokesperson for the company did not respond but told Buzzfeed that the company was “against hate speech.”
Facebook spokesperson Dani Lever released a statement which said that Facebook teams worked with their clients around the world on various issues and they worked with companies to “keep hate off of their pages.”
