On Tuesday, Kim Kardashian-West — who has one of the biggest Instagram followings in the world — said she would join other high-profile users in a protest against Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, and its handling of misinformation and hate.
Other high profile celebrities that will take part in the protest on Wednesday are Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Orlando Bloom, Kerry Washington, and Sacha Baron Cohen.
“I love that I can connect directly with you through Instagram and Facebook, but I can’t sit by and stay silent while these platforms continue to allow the spreading of hate, propaganda, and misinformation,” Kardashian-West wrote in a post published to multiple social media accounts Tuesday.
“Misinformation shared on social media has a serious impact on our elections and undermines our democracy. Please join me tomorrow when I will be ‘freezing’ my Instagram and FB account to tell Facebook to #StopHateForProfit,” she added.
On Monday, the coalition of civil rights groups that organized July’s Facebook ad boycott announced that it was calling on celebrities and companies to stop posting on Instagram for a day on Wednesday to protest the social media giant’s handling of hate on its platform and to call on the company to stop allowing politicians to lie in political ads.
Protest organizers, including the ADL and NAACP, pointed to Facebook’s failure to shut down the page of a Kenosha militia group as one reason to protest.