Facebook sold advertisements targeted to antisemitic users drawn to phrases like “Jew haters”, according to a report in ProPublica.
The social media giant’s ad-buying platform allows purchasers to tailor their ads to certain categories of users, seeking to guide advertisements into the newsfeeds of more receptive audiences. Among the available subgroups were users who expressed interest in topics like “Jew haters” and “How to burn Jews”, ProPublica found.
The categories had relatively few users - a little over 2,000 for the “Jew haters” label and a handful scattered across other anti-Semitic labels - and in response to the story Facebook removed the categories, which it said were generated by users who wrote phrases that then became visible to advertisers entering search terms.
“We don't allow hate speech on Facebook“, product management director Rob Leathern said in a statement. “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.
"However, there are times where content is surfaced on our platform that violates our standards. In this case, we've removed the associated targeting fields in question. 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.”
But the discovery adds to an intensifying focus on how various types of speech, including advertisements, flow through one of the world’s dominant sources of information and social interaction.
Last week, Facebook revealed that during the 2016 election cycle it sold thousands of advertisements to fake accounts likely operated out of Russia. Specifically crafted to widen divisions over issues like race and immigration, the ads appeared in newsfeeds as Russia was directing what intelligence agencies have called a concerted effort to disrupt the election.
A maelstrom of overtly partisan and often inaccurate content swamped Facebook and other social media sites during the contentious 2016 election. In response, Facebook unveiled safeguards that bar ad sales to “fake news” disseminators and downplay stories with misleading clickbait headlines.
While the technology industry has generally tried to remain neutral on the beliefs its tools publish and spread, violence against protesters outside a neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia has tested the boundary between allowing free speech and permitting incitement to violence. In the aftermath off Charlottesville, multiple companies cut off users like the neo-Nazi hub the Daily Stormer.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to the bloodshed by writing that “there is no place for hate in our community” and that the site was committed to removing content that “promotes or celebrates hate crimes or acts of terrorism.
“We won't always be perfect, but you have my commitment that we'll keep working to make Facebook a place where everyone can feel safe”, Mr Zuckerberg wrote.
