#Sheryl Sandberg denies Facebook is feeling pressure from ad boycott

Facebook is making changes to its hate speech policies ahead of its meeting with civil rights leaders on Tuesday, but operating chief Sheryl Sandberg insists they aren’t in response to high-profile ad boycotts.

In a Tuesday morning post on her Facebook page, Sandberg said that the results of the company’s two-year independent civil rights audit will be released Wednesday, and that Facebook will “soon” be implementing several unspecified proposals “from the auditors and the wider civil rights community into practice.”

Sandberg stressed that Facebook “agreed to undertake the civil rights audit two years ago” as the company has “worked for years to try to minimize the presence of hate on our platform.”

The changes that Facebook is making, then, are coming “not for financial reasons or advertiser pressure, but because it is the right thing to do,” she said.

Still, they arrive a week into a monthlong boycott of Facebook’s advertising platform that has more than 400 brands onboard — including Starbucks, Microsoft and Coca-Cola — and ahead of CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Sandberg’s meeting with leaders from the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP and Color of Change.

Boycotters have pulled their ads in support of advocates’ demands for the company to more aggressively tackle hate speech and misinformation.

Zuckerberg last month struck a defiant tone when asked about the boycotters during an employee town hall, saying that Facebook wouldn’t change its policies “because of a threat to a small percent of our revenue, or to any percent of our revenue.”

Zuckerberg also bemoaned the way that boycotters were going about trying to spark change, saying that Facebook would not be strong-armed.

“Usually I tend to think that if someone goes out there and threatens you to do something, that actually kind of puts you in a box where in some ways it’s even harder to do what they want because now it looks like you’re capitulating,” Zuckerberg said.

Facebook shares were up 1.9 percent at $244.91 in early Tuesday trades.