Jim Steyer: the man who took on Mark Zuckerberg

"With more than two billion users Facebook is bigger than Christianity,” says Stanford law professor Jim Steyer. “Their ability to amplify hate speech or white supremacy or racist messages is so extraordinary because of the scale of the platform.” It’s a typically bold statement from the man who set up the Stop Hate for Profit (SHFP) campaign calling on advertisers to withdraw from Facebook for the month of July. More than 500 firms have joined the temporary boycott, including Coca-Cola, Adidas and Unilever.

Steyer is the founder of Common Sense Media, a non-profit organisation that promotes safe media and entertainment for children. A New Yorker, he started out as a schoolteacher in Harlem and the South Bronx, moved into civil rights – he did death penalty work with the lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson and ran the NAACP Legal Defence Fund – and began teaching civil liberties at Stanford in 1986. 

It’s no coincidence, he argues, that the growth in unregulated social media has been accompanied by a growth in “authoritarian populism”. He points to social media manipulation, electoral subversion, Russian dark ops and libertarian apologists. And he has little truck for the defence, made by Facebook communications chief Nick Clegg, that as over 100 billion messages are posted on Facebook’s services each day, it’s impossible to capture every piece of hate speech (Clegg claims almost 90% of it is removed before it is reported). “Don’t tell me they can’t figure that out,” says Steyer. “They’re a trillion-dollar company. If they really wanted to, they could completely clean up that platform.”