Nationwide and Nissan were among the companies that pulled ads from the social media giant Facebook after seeing them alongside misogynistic content, according to Financial Times.

The move, also promoted by Unilever’s Dove brand and American Express, has Facebook reportedly re-evaluating the content it allows on its service with the potential loss of big dollars via ad revenue.

A Nissan spokesperson indicated the company is working with Facebook to be able to not appear on pages with potentially offensive material on a global basis. In the meantime, the company reportedly stopped placing ads on Facebook though it will look into ways to solve the problem.

“As a responsible and trusted consumer brand, we do feel that sites like Facebook should have stringent processes and guidelines in place to ensure that brands are able to protect themselves from appearing alongside inappropriate content,” Nationwide said in a statement.

Facebook executives indicated they are taking the situation seriously, even admitting they have come up short thus far in allowing offensive material.

“We have been working over the past several months to improve our systems to respond to reports of violations, but the guidelines used by these systems have failed to capture all the content that violates our standards,” Marne Levine, Facebook’s vice president of global public policy, said in a statement. “We need to do better – and we will.”

As part of that effort, the company promised to review its guidelines on evaluating content that violates its standards and to train moderators to remove hate speech when they see it. More than 5,000 people emailed Facebook advertisers and more than 60,000 tweets were recorded with the hashtag #FBrape in order to get the company’s attention.

Several women’s groups, including the Everyday Sexism Project and Women, Action and the Media, also teamed up to express their concern over the matter to Facebook. They penned a letter to the company in which they pushed for the classification of violence against women and girls as hate speech and also requested that Facebook make changes to their policy.

The condoning of rape or domestic violence is a serious matter, they contended, and something Facebook needs to get out front of with its power and popularity. Google Inc. and Twitter may also come under increasing pressure to ensure that free speech doesn’t cross the line into hate speech.

Facebook was reportedly the first social networking company targeted due to its success and reach, according to insiders. Twitter has not yet explicitly addressed hate speech but may be expected to if its reach and popularity continue to grow.