Keyes says he got tired of Facebook censoring Black users when they call out racism while permitting hateful speech and memes to spread unchecked.

Black people produce and share substantially more content than other groups on Facebook, according to Facebook's internal research.

The number of Black monthly users on Facebook declined 2.7% in a single month to 17.3 million adults, according to a research report, “Industry Update on Racial Justice and Black Users,” in February.

“A lot of the downtick in Black usership has been because people are being banned or shadow banned or had their accounts suspended for talking about Black issues, and obviously there was a rise of that during George Floyd,” said the former employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his current employer does not permit him to speak about Facebook.

“I have noticed younger people are definitely trending away from Facebook,” said social media influencer Erynn Chambers, who maintains a Facebook account but spends most of her time on TikTok. .

Black Americans are among the top users of Facebook Stories and also dominate posts in News Feed.

but has “clusters of intense production” in places with a high concentration of African Americans such as the arc in the Southeast known as the Black Belt, Facebook research found.

Rather than collect data about users’ demographics for the research, Facebook used ZIP code data as a proxy to study how people from different backgrounds use its products.

“We live in this hostile real world where Black people are punished more harshly for the same things that white people do and then we go into this virtual world and it’s the same thing,” Robinson said.

Robinson, who helped lead the advertiser boycott, said Zuckerberg told him that the harms Robinson claimed Black people were experiencing were not reflected in the company’s internal data. .

Yet, a two-year Facebook research project found that “the worst of the worst” content on the platform targets Black people, Muslims, the LGBTQ community, Jews and people of more than one race, according to Facebook research documents viewed by USA TODAY. .

“They believe at Facebook that, as long as they are spurring some sort of social connection, it doesn’t matter how many people are hurt and harmed, especially if those people are not white,” Robinson said.

Another effort, Project Aperture, built on the findings of Project Vibe, studying how African Americans “over proportionately” share Facebook Stories.

“Learning more and building empathy for this community is imperative to Stories' success,” Facebook researchers said.

Last month, Facebook announced its civil rights team and an artificial intelligence team would gather data to determine if it treats users differently based on race.

But, he said, “a piece of civil rights work is being transparent and being transparent with the community.”.

Wade Henderson, interim president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said Meta must confront its role “in perpetuating social harms and to assess how they are addressing critical concerns.” .

“Being transparent about civil rights challenges is critical, as is pro-active due diligence and adequate follow-through on commitments,” he said.

“There is a historic distrust that Black Americans have in traditional and legacy media,” said Sherri Williams, assistant professor at American University who studies social media and representation of African Americans in media.

Now that people are so invested in Facebook, it becomes difficult to divest, said Kishonna Gray, associate professor of writing, rhetoric and digital studies at the University of Kentucky.  

“That's a good example of Black users saying we've had enough,” Tyree said

She says she’s been suspended from Facebook 18 times in the past couple of years, once just for quoting a white woman who screamed a racial slur at a Black family celebrating Easter

It has provided a platform that in any other world, Black people would never have had access to,” she said