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Facebook gets rid of anti-Semitic advertising fields

Lauren Kate Rawlins
By Lauren Kate Rawlins, ITWeb digital and innovation contributor.
Johannesburg, 15 Sept 2017
Facebook allows advertisers to target adverts at specific groups of people.
Facebook allows advertisers to target adverts at specific groups of people.

The social media network has removed categories in its advertising platform that enabled advertisers to target their content directly to groups of people who were self-identified "Jew haters", or who had expressed an interest in "how to burn Jews", or in the "history of 'why Jews ruin the world'".

Facebook collects vast amounts of data on its users, including photographs, allowing it to demographically categorise them in ways that allow advertisers to target content precisely to those they want to reach.

These offensive 'fields of interest' were created by algorithms and show up in the Facebook ads interface as targetable audiences for campaigns.

The categories were discovered by ProPublica, a non-profit investigative news organisation, which published a report and contacted the social network to alert it.

Facebook said it took action once it was notified of the existence of the categories by ProPublica: "We immediately removed them. Given that the number of people in these segments was incredibly low [fewer than 5 000], an extremely small number of people were targeted in these campaigns."

The social network said in a statement there are restrictions on how audience targeting can be used on Facebook.

"Hate speech and discriminatory advertising have no place on our platform. Our community standards strictly prohibit attacking people based on their protected characteristics, including religion, and we prohibit advertisers from discriminating against people based on religion and other attributes," the company said in a statement.

"Keeping our community safe is critical to our mission. And to help ensure that targeting is not used for discriminatory purposes, we are removing these self-reported targeting fields until we have the right processes in place to help prevent this issue. We want Facebook to be a safe place for people and businesses, and we'll continue to do everything we can to keep hate off Facebook."

The company said advertisers can report any inappropriate targeting fields directly in the ads interface or via its Help Centre.

However, the update comes amid growing scrutiny of how the world's largest online social media network's policies and algorithms shape what content appears in a user's news feed.

Facebook's ad-targeting practices have been questioned as they allow advertisers to send adverts to specific groups of people, even if those advertisers are selling an ideology and a physical product. This creates a 'bubble' where people only see adverts they would already agree with, reinforcing their world view.

Last week, the company found that an operation likely based in Russia spent $100 000 on thousands of US ads promoting divisive social and political messages in a two-year period through May. The 3 000 ads and 470 'inauthentic' accounts and pages spread polarising views on topics including immigration, race and gay rights.

Another $50 000 was spent on 2 200 "potentially politically related" ads, likely by Russians, Facebook said.

This is also not the first time Facebook has been in trouble for highly targeted advertising practices. Last year, the network came under fire for allowing advertisers to exclude racial or ethnic groups when placing ads on its service.

A report was also published on ProPublica detailing the practice it said may violate US federal housing and civil rights laws passed in the 1960s.

Facebook has since disabled the use of the advertising tool, called 'ethnic affinities', for ads that offer housing, employment and the extension of credit; areas where certain groups have historically faced discrimination, Facebook said in a blog post at the time.

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