We are building a grassroots movement of users, workers, and impacted communities to take on Facebook/Meta and win real changes to prevent further harms.
The Facebook Users Union is a joint project between Media Alliance and Global Exchange, proud to boast over 30k members and counting. Over the past few months, we’ve been connecting with members and conducting listening sessions and activism trainings, helping grow our collective power to more effectively take on the giant company’s ongoing human rights abuses, both in the United States and globally.
The crisis could not be more urgent. Facebook’s well documented role in facilitating human rights abuses includes genocide in Myanmar, racial violence in Ethiopia, India, and Kenya, organizing for the Capitol riot of January 6, and abortion surveillance in the United States.
In the run-up to the quickly approaching 2024 presidential election, we can no longer allow our lawmakers to accept donations to continue to support Big Tech companies, while Big Tech harms both users and workers.
It is time to build a global user and worker solidarity movement that holds these tech companies accountable without compromise. We are calling users and workers of big tech platforms to unite.
It is necessary that we collectively challenge ourselves as users and workers of these big tech companies to do more to call out Big Tech’s role in authoritarian violence around the world. We must change the rules of engagement. We can no longer accept their model that makes money off of our “clicks, views, likes” and the harm they allow others to do to our communities.
We are not just passive users and consumers of content and their products, we are creators. We the people, the users of these big tech platforms, have the power to create change.
Visit www.facebookusers.org to get involved and news on our latest actions.
We support the following changes to Facebook’s policies and will act to urge the company’s leadership to adopt them:
Do not amplify posts and groups that promote hate, violence, or disinformation or recommend them to other Facebook users.
Implement circuit breakers to temporarily slow or stop newly viral content while it’s fact checked, such as the mechanisms in use in the stock market.
Shift moderation resources to focus on superspreader high-volume content from the most distributed sources instead of focusing it on small grassroots activists; invest in improving non-English content review.
Correct disinformation by displaying a correction to every Facebook user who was exposed to misinformation, as defined by independent fact-checkers.
Adopt a data minimization model that limits transfers of personal information to third parties and allows users to indicate what kinds of information they are willing to share for personalized advertising – and what kinds of information they aren’t.
Apply the same standards to all Facebook users and advertisers. Governments, political leaders and political advertisers should not be exempt from the standards others are held to.
Refuse service to anyone who uses the platform to disrupt elections in the US and abroad.