Open letter to Hootsuite
January 30, 2026
To Hootsuite, Irina Novoselsky (CEO), and the Hootsuite Board of Directors
We and many others Canadians call upon you to immediately end your contracts with U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security.
In 2020, Hootsuite cancelled an ICE contract after employees objected. We are asking you to make that choice again.
Your company is providing social media monitoring tools to DHS and its agencies, including ICE. These help them hone their image-making machine, spreading white supremacist memes and blatant lies.
However, you have insisted that you’ll maintain these contracts as long as ICE abides by your terms of service, which prohibit use “for law enforcement, surveillance, tracking”. Based on reporting we have profound doubts that these terms are being honoured. We want to be clear that terms-of-service compliance is not our main concern.
Our main concern is that ICE has become the enforcement arm of a fascist regime. They have killed civilians on the streets including American citizens, separated children from families at record rates, and held people in facilities with inhumane conditions, documented sexual abuse, and record deaths in custody. 1200 people are missing from a remote facility in Florida – just gone without a explanation or accountability.
This also conflicts with Hootsuite’s own anti-slavery policy, given ICE’s use of coerced labour paid as little as $1 per day in private detention facilities that generate profits for corporate actors tied to Donald Trump’s inner circle. This is not a compliance issue, but a contradiction of values.
In the past three weeks alone, ICE agents have killed two people in Minneapolis: Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother and poet, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse. Video evidence contradicts federal officials’ accounts of both killings.
The administration ICE represents has repeatedly levelled threats against Canadian sovereignty, so they can bring ICE inside our borders.
We and many other Canadians need you to:
- end all contracts with ICE immediately
- commit to not providing tools that facilitate authoritarian enforcement
- publicly disclose all government and law enforcement partnerships
Anything less will remain a stain on Canadian history.
ICE — and the hatred and cruelty that one day may be turned on us — has no place in Canada. Canadian businesses have no place working with them.
The growing horrors at the hands of ICE echo the worst human atrocities. No ‘terms of service compliance’ makes partnership with ICE acceptable. It may be painful to sever your connection with this force, but your employees and fellow Canadians will applaud you for it.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Democracy Rising
