Patagonia and REI join The North Face, pull ads from Facebook

The North Face's boycott of Facebook has been joined by competitors and partners alike, as Patagonia and REI have announced they'll cease advertising on the platform for the month of July.

The initiative, known as Stop Hate for Profit, was created by the NAACP, Anti-Defamation League, and four other civil rights groups in response to Facebook's failure to combat hate and misinformation on the platform. It calls for companies to stop advertising on Facebook and the platforms it owns, including Instagram, as motivation to make more substantive changes.

Unlike The North Face, which said Facebook subsidiaries are "not yet affected" by their decision, Patagonia and REI have committed to boycotting Instagram as well.

#StopHateForProfit — Cory Bayers, Patagonia's head of marketing, issued a statement announcing its participation in the campaign through a press release Sunday. "For too long, Facebook has failed to take sufficient steps to stop the spread of hateful lies and dangerous propaganda on its platform," Bayers said. "From secure elections to a global pandemic to racial justice, the stakes are too high to sit back and let the company continue to be complicit in spreading disinformation and fomenting fear and hatred."

Patagonia's boycott will run through "at least" the end of July, "pending meaningful action."

REI announced its own participation Friday with a tweet saying it'll continue to "put people over profits."

$70 billion in revenue — The campaign took out a full-page advertisement in the Los Angeles Times last week calling out what Facebook has done with its $70 billion in yearly advertising revenue. "Could they protect and support Black users?" it read. "Could they call out Holocaust denial as hate? Could they help get out the vote? They absolutely could. But they are actively choosing not to do so."

Facebook's failure / refusal to take responsibility for the content on its platform is well-documented, although it did take a rare step by removing Donald Trump's campaign ads containing clear Nazi imagery. Prior to that, Mark Zuckerberg said Trump's horrifying "looting and shooting" post wasn't racist. Twitter didn't remove the post but did add an obscuring module to indicate that the tweet violated its guidelines. It could only be seen after clicking "view" on the advisory.

Zuckerberg also thinks Twitter should allow disinformation in the same way Facebook does — but we'll see if his tone changes now that advertisers are starting to put money on the line.