Creating Welcoming and Inclusive Online Communities

Updated August 5, 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 few weeks 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); 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 are evaluating each platform separately and have begun to resume paid social media advertising on select 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.