Creating Welcoming and Inclusive Online Communities
Starbucks pauses advertising on social media and calls for a stop to the spread of hate speech on those platforms.
Updated September 8, 2020
We believe in bringing communities together, both in person and online, and we stand against hate speech. We believe more must be done to create welcoming and inclusive online communities, and we believe both business leaders and policy makers need to come together to affect real change.
Since Starbucks paused advertising on all social media platforms in July, we have spent the last two months in meaningful discussions with key internal and external stakeholders to help us create a principled approach to our demands of the social media industry. In our path forward, we will monitor all platforms’ content, community health and brand suitability, with a continued focus on: transparency (demanding more information about their progress on addressing content that goes against our brand standards and about where our ads appear); enforcement of their standards across platforms (to ensure they are eliminating prohibiting content); and governance and accountability (to ensure that they have the mechanisms to enforce and will continue to make progress where needed).
Based on the productive conversations and commitments of these platforms to date, we evaluated each platform separately and have resumed paid social media advertising on social media platforms based on these principles over the remainder of this calendar year. We will hold our media partners accountable to the commitments they have made and will reserve the right to revisit our ad placement strategy to ensure continued progress towards a more civil online environment.