New Campaign Aims To Ban Facebook’s Data Harvesting Practices

A coalition of over 40 organizations is calling for the federal government to shut down the tech giant’s current business model.

The campaign, titled “How to Stop Facebook”, was launched Wednesday and aims to pass legislation that would strengthen data privacy protections. Protecting user data is at the heart of the movement, which argues that the company uses the massive amount of data they collect to fuel ad revenue and corporate profits.

Multiple groups are behind the campaign, including Fight For The Future, Win Without War, Media Justice, amongst others. Many of these groups are concerned with the level of control Facebook (FB) seems to have in curating what content goes viral and what gets buried, in order to maximize the amount of money they can generate via advertisements.

A petition linked to the campaign is calling for lawmakers to start looking into “Facebook’s harms”, along with recommendations on how Congress should aim to pass further data privacy legislation. There seems to be a sense of frustration around the way the tech company pushes whatever agenda is most profitable for them, leading to an incompatibility with human rights. Manipulating information and data to only glorify a particular rhetoric can be harmful and detrimental to individuals engaged in the platform.

Myaisha Hayes, campaign strategies director of Media Justice, states that Facebook’s “surveillance machine … is putting our communities and our democracy in danger. It’s time for lawmakers to cut off their fuel supply by passing a strong data privacy law.”