Facebook Enabled Advertisers to Reach 'Jew Haters'
After being contacted by ProPublica, Facebook removed several anti-Semitic ad categories and promised to improve monitoring.
by Julia Angwin, Madeleine Varner and Ariana Tobin Sept. 14, 4 p.m. EDT
Want to market Nazi memorabilia, or recruit marchers for a far-right rally? Facebooks self-service ad-buying platform had the right audience for you.
Until this week, when we asked Facebook about it, the worlds largest social network enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of Jew hater, How to burn jews, or, History of why jews ruin the world.
To test if these ad categories were real, we paid $30 to target those groups with three promoted posts in which a ProPublica article or post was displayed in their news feeds. Facebook approved all three ads within 15 minutes.
After we contacted Facebook, it removed the anti-Semitic categories which were created by an algorithm rather than by people and said it would explore ways to fix the problem, such as limiting the number of categories available or scrutinizing them before they are displayed to buyers.
There are times where content is surfaced on our platform that violates our standards, said Rob Leathern, product management director at Facebook. In this case, weve removed the associated targeting fields in question. We know we have more work to do, so were also building new guardrails in our product and review processes to prevent other issues like this from happening in the future.
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https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-enabled-advertisers-to-reach-jew-hatersutm_campaign=sprout&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_content=1505419461