Facebook revamps policy after report on anti-Semitic targeting
Facebook said it was revising its advertising policies to prevent “discriminatory” targeting after a news report showed marketers could aim messages at categories of people such as “Jew haters”. The world’s biggest social network announced the change after the nonprofit investigative news site Pro Publica revealed how advertisers could target messages to demographic categories including anti-Semitic users.
Facebook product manager Rob Leathern said that the company had changed its ad targeting policy after learning about the report, saying these messages represented “hate speech” prohibited by Facebook.
“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,” Leathern said in a statement to AFP. “We know we have more work to do, so we’re also building new guardrails in our product and review processes to prevent other issues like this from happening in the future.”
Google ads too
Separately, Google said it was re-examining its ad targeting process after a BuzzFeed report indicating how messages could be delivered to users based on racist or bigoted search terms such as “evil Jew.”
“Our goal is to prevent our keyword suggestions tool from making offensive suggestions, and to stop any …read more
