What is the problem with Hootsuite?
Democracy Rising is campaigning against Hootsuite to stop them collaborating with ICE. Hootsuite was a Vancouver success story. But times have changed, and now they are working for ICE in the US; a dangerous, law-breaking agency that kidnaps citizens off the streets without cause, imprisons tens of thousands of innocent people and which may well attack Canada in future. For more information about what Hootsuite is doing and why we oppose it, please check out the FAQs below.
If you’re already up to speed with the issue, here’s what we’re doing and how you can help.
Hootsuite FAQ
In the case of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE), we see a lurch to brazen law-breaking and human rights abuse. Every day they violate the US Constitution, denying citizens due process and illegally arresting and imprisoning people who are obeying the laws. They have continuously violated court orders by refusing to release people who were improperly detained. They subject detainees to inhuman conditions, including withholding food, solitary confinement, torture, rape and murder. They routinely deny medical care and communications with lawyers and loved ones. By any objective measure, they are no longer a law enforcement agency; they are a law destruction agency.
Hootsuite and its ‘Talkwalker’ component helps ICE manage social media while monitoring social media conversations. It enables ICE to schedule posts on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube, reply to messages in one inbox, and track performance with dashboards and reports. Using AI, the software can also detect logos and other elements in images, videos, hashtags, (and possibly icons and phrases linked to anti-authoritarian movements), helping flag posts that show negative sentiment toward authorities. AI tools help spot trends and provide other date-driven insights. It is likely they can provide lists of specific accounts opposing ICE. As we know, people posting against ICE and Trump are now officially designated ‘domestic terrorists’. As this is done in secrecy, we don’t yet know how extensive their use of video analysis and targeting is. We would like to be fair and fully accurate, but they won’t talk with us except to deny any wrongdoing, despite the advertised capabilities of their products.
ICE often spreads messaging to incite hatred toward immigrants, visible minorities and protestors. Though the vast majority of their prisoners have no criminal record, ICE doesn’t differentiate between people who are following all immigration laws, as if they are literally ‘invading’ the country as aggressors. It uses phrasing and imagery associated with white supremacist groups, such as one set of controversial ads used the phrase “We’ll have our home again,” a line from a song known to be popular with white supremacist groups. Other posts showed pictures and slogans about “saving American culture from invaders” with images of white settlers “protecting America from invaders,” which implied that the US needs ‘ethnic cleansing’. It also promotes the actions of ICE and misinforms the public about their actions and intentions, such as calling peaceful protestors ‘domestic terrorists’ and generating hatred towards them.
After World War II, companies that were seen helping or working with Nazi Germany faced serious consequences in Allied countries.
In France, the car company Renault was taken over by the government in 1945 because it had made vehicles for German forces. Executives in France and Norway were investigated and sometimes charged with crimes. In Canada and the United States, governments seized property and businesses that were controlled by enemy countries during the war. The U.S. Congress also held investigations into business dealings before and during the war, and many years later, companies like IBM and Ford faced lawsuits for what their German branches had done. Even if legal penalties were small, many companies suffered long-term damage to their reputation, sometimes for decades.
Democracy Rising is a grass roots organization seeking to protect Canada from the rise of authoritarianism we see in the US. Trump repeatedly taunts us about a ‘51st state’, and the ‘Project 2025’ agenda proclaims an empire stretching from Greenland, across North and Central America down to Venezuela. It is possible that the Trump regime will seek to dominate our country, and ICE is the sharp end of his sword. It is intolerable that a Canadian company is empowering a clear human-rights violator and potential enemy.
The modern slavery act page on their website says: “Hootsuite remains vigilant and monitors the level of risk involved through any of our supply chains and will take appropriate measures if a higher risk of modern slavery is deemed to exist.”
The supply chain ends with the customer, not the vendor. If you find out your client uses your product to injure people, do you keep selling it to them? Which appropriate measures were actually taken? Was a risk of modern slavery, open and public, deemed not to exist?
“Our subsidiaries, our customers and our vendors are generally located in jurisdictions where we do not consider there to be a high risk of modern slavery.”
It is public knowledge that in the US, inmates of for-profit prisons and ICE for-profit detention centres must work for $1/day to earn money for a phone call to their family. It goes far beyond this. It is slavery and that’s bad, though it’s not illegal in the US for a convict to be enslaved. But at least 70% of the people in ICE detention never committed any crime.
They link to a Vendor Code of Conduct that outlines how they expect their customers to behave. It goes to a page that says “Oh snap! We got lost.”
