Good morning. 🏟️ Amazon has bought the naming rights to Seattle’s KeyArena, the new home for the city’s NHL and WNBA teams, and will rename it the Climate Pledge Arena in honor of Amazon's pledge to reach “net zero” carbon emissions by 2040.

• "It will be the first net zero carbon certified arena in the world," Jeff Bezos said on Instagram, adding that it would "generate zero waste... and use reclaimed rainwater... to create the greenest ice in the NHL."

Join the Market: 🗞️ Newsletter | 🎙️ Podcast

Bloomberg/Getty

Sense & symbolism

Here's how the Facebook ad boycott plays out

Moving the Market: Facebook is scrambling to contain a growing advertising boycott that is intended to pressure the social media giant into taking greater action on hate speech. On Thursday, Verizon became the biggest company yet to join the campaign.

• The latest: Seeking to quell concerns, Facebook Global Marketing VP Carolyn Everson sent an email to advertisers this week outlining the company's existing efforts to curb hate speech. She also said that Facebook does "not make policy changes tied to revenue pressure," but instead sets policies "based on principles."

The big picture: The boycott is a PR problem for Facebook, even if it won't really affect the company's annual $70 billion-plus of ad revenue. It's also likely to end with Facebook's critics taking credit for changes the company was probably going to make anyway.

The backstory: The ADL, NAACP and other civil rights groups who organized the boycott are calling on Facebook to "stop generating ad revenue from hateful content, provide more support to people who are targets of racism and hate, and to increase safety for private groups on the platform."

• They also condemn Facebook's inaction on President Trump's "looting... shooting" posts, in which the president implied that protesters might be shot. The groups say that by keeping those posts up, Facebook "allowed incitement to violence against protesters fighting for racial justice."

On all these issues, Facebook is probably more aligned with the organizers of the boycott than those organizers either realize or are willing to acknowledge.

1. "Hateful content" isn't something Facebook wants on its platform. In recent years, it has dedicated billions of dollars to fighting hate speech. Facebook data shows that the company identifies 89 percent of the hate speech it removes on its own, up from 23 percent in 2017. A new E.U. report found similar progress.

• Closing the gap on that last 10-11 percent is a massive challenge for Facebook, in part because hate speech is harder to identify and define than, say, nudity or terrorist content, where Facebook has even higher rates of success in monitoring.

• As with YouTube and Twitter, some percentage of hate speech will always have to be flagged by users, and there are many times when Facebook will determine that flagged content doesn't qualify as hate. But to demand that Facebook "stop generating ad revenue from hateful content" is to imply that Facebook tolerates content even if it considers it to be hateful, and that is not the case.

2. "Support" and "safety" for targets of racism and hate is another area where Facebook has tried to make real progress. Since 2018, the company has enlisted ACLU veteran Laura Murphy to run an annual civil rights audit. Every year, that audit identifies areas where Facebook needs to make progress with respect to racism and hate.

• Murphy has just concluded her third audit, and Facebook will likely post her findings within a matter of weeks (last year's findings were posted on June 30). Those findings will inform ⁠— and would have informed ⁠— how Facebook thinks about the very issues that the civil rights groups have called on the company to address.

3. The Trump posts have already forced a great deal of soul searching inside Facebook, largely due to the internal protests from employees. On June 5, Zuckerberg said Facebook would review its policies "allowing discussion and threats of state use of force to see if there are any amendments we should adopt."

• Facebook may yet augment its policies on posts involving state force (which, it should be noted, is not actually a hate speech issue), but if it does, it will likely be because of employees, not advertisers.

What's next: Within the next few weeks, Facebook may announce the findings of its civil rights audit along with additional steps it is taking to combat hate speech and increase support and safety for targets of racism and hate. It may also announce revisions to its policies on content involving state force.

• When that happens, it will almost certainly be interpreted as a concession to the boycotters — despite the fact that it will have come about as a result of the audit, the internal deliberations and the company's longstanding efforts to combat harmful content.

At that point, Verizon and the other brands that temporarily froze ad spending (Ben & Jerry's, REI, Patagonia) will start making their way back to Facebook, a company that will have the same values it had before they left, having done little more than won themselves fleeting accolades from Facebook's critics.

💄 Moving Ad-land 💄

Unilever, Procter & Gamble, L’Oreal and Johnson & Johnson "have been accused of openly promoting a beauty standard rooted in racism and discrimination," NYT's Priya Arora and Sapna Maheshwari report.

• "The backlash appears to be forcing action. Unilever said on Thursday that it would remove the words 'fair/fairness, white/whitening, and light/lightening' from product packaging and communications..."

Bloomberg/Getty

State of media

Patrick Soon-Shiong settles discrimination suit

Big in L.A.: Patrick Soon-Shiong is settling a proposed class-action lawsuit from six journalists at the Los Angeles Times who allege that people of color are underrepresented at the paper because of discriminatory pay practices, NPR’s David Folkenflik reports.

• The data: An L.A. Times News Guild study from April 2018 found that women on average made $14,000 less than men and non-white journalists made $19,000 less than their white peers.

The big picture: "The newly public complaint cites practices that span decades and a series of previous owners. … It is the latest episode in a newsroom with a fraught history over race and gender.”

• What's next: In addition to the settlement, the LA Times has promised cultural changes to “redress decades of mistreatment and neglect of journalists of color.”

Market Links

• Masa Son quits Alibaba board (WSJ)

• Sundar Pichai will pay some publishers (WSJ)

• Bill Barr keeps his antitrust sights set on Google (NYT)

• Susan Wojcicki rolls out YouTube's TikTok rival (TC)

• Bob Chapek revamps Splash Mountain (NYT)

Daniel Boczarski/Getty

Off court

LeBron James, Maverick Carter raise $100m

Talk of Tinseltown: LeBron James and Maverick Carter have secured $100 million to form SpringHill Co., which will combine their three existing businesses: SpringHill Entertainment, Uninterrupted and Robot, Bloomberg's Jason Kelly reports.

• The big picture: The $100 million will allow James and Carter to vastly expand a media business centered around diverse content creators, as well as athlete empowerment. It also solidifies James and Carter's standing in Hollywood.

• SpringHill will give a "voice to creators and consumers who’ve been pandered to, ignored, or underserved," Kelly writes. That's especially relevant now as the media industry faces a reckoning over the lack of diverse representation.

The investors are "Guggenheim Partners, UC Investments... Elisabeth Murdoch’s content company Sister, and SC.Holdings, the investment fund run by entrepreneur Jason Stein."

• "James is chairman... Carter is CEO. Joining them on the board [are] Murdoch, Scott Minerd... Serena Williams... Marc Rowan... Michael Rapino... Tom Werner and [Paul] Wachter."

What's next: When I interviewed Carter in March, we spoke about the $100 million investment. Unfortunately, we were forced to scrap that portion of the interview from the podcast after the timing of the announcement was delayed. But here's what he told me then:

• "What this money allows us to do is to create more content, more voices, more products... in a way that... ultimately empowers talent writers, producers, directors, athletes, actors and empowers consumers and fans that are from our community."

Listen to the full episode here.

🌞 What's next: The weekend.

See you Monday.