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 non-profit investigative news site Pro Publica revealed how advertisers could target messages to demographic categories including antisemitic 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.”
