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Danish toy giant Lego boycotts social media advertising over toxic content

Danish toy maker Lego said Wednesday it was halting all paid advertising on social media for a month, joining a growing list of global brands boycotting social networking giants over their handling of hateful and toxic content.

Danish toy giant Lego boycotts social media advertising over toxic content
Lego's The Brick-changer float. Photo: Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images For Macy's Inc/AFP Eugene Gologursky / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP
“We are committed to having a positive impact on children and the world they will inherit,” Julia Goldin, Chief Marketing Officer at Lego, said in a statement.
   
“That includes contributing to a positive, inclusive digital environment free from hate speech, discrimination and misinformation.”
   
The plastic brick maker is following in the footsteps of more than 400 companies, including Adidas, Coca-Cola, Levi's, Unilever and Starbucks, which have joined the #stophateforprofit campaign.
   
The campaign has called for the suspension of all advertising on Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram for the month of July, to encourage them to review their policies on hateful rhetoric, harassment and misinformation.
   
Like Lego, some companies have decided to pause all social media spending, rather than singling out Facebook.
 
   
Last week, Facebook said it would ban a “wider category of hateful content” in ads and add tags to posts that are “newsworthy” but violate platform rules — following the lead of Twitter, which has used such labels on tweets from US President Donald Trump.

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BUSINESS

Denmark’s toy giant Lego offers staff bonus after bumper year

Danish toymaker Lego, the world's largest toymaker, Denmark's Lego, said on Tuesday it will offer its 20,000 employees three extra days of holiday and a special bonus after a year of bumper revenues.

Lego is rewarding staff with a Christmas bonus and extra holiday after a strong 2022.
Lego is rewarding staff with a Christmas bonus and extra holiday after a strong 2022. File photo: Ida Guldbæk Arentsen/Ritzau Scanpix

Already popular globally, Lego has seen demand for its signature plastic bricks soar during the pandemic alongside its rapid expansion in China.

“The owner family wishes to… thank all colleagues with an extra three days off at the end of 2021,” the company said in a statement.

The unlisted family group reported a net profit of more than 6.3 billion Danish kroner (847 million euros) for the first half of 2021.

Revenues shot up 46 percent to 23 billion kroner in the same period.

It had been “an extraordinary year for the Lego Group and our colleagues have worked incredibly hard,” said the statement, which added that an unspecified special bonus would be paid to staff in April 2022.

Lego, a contraction of the Danish for “play well” (leg godt), was founded in 1932 by Kirk Kristiansen, whose family still controls the group which employs about 20,400 people in 40 countries.

READ ALSO: Lego profits tower to new heights as stores reopen

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