Facebook Looks to Curtail Ads Targeting Users Interested in Anti-Semitic Topics
September 20 2017 - 7:24PM
Dow Jones News
By Deepa Seetharaman
Facebook Inc. is adding more human reviewers to oversee its
advertising system after a report showed that people could target
ads at users interested in anti-Semitic and other hateful
topics.
The problem stems from how Facebook's ad system automatically
mines information from user profiles to create specific topics that
advertisers can pay to target.
In a report last week, news outlet ProPublica showed that the
system could enable someone to show ads to Facebook users whose
profiles included terms like "Jew hater" or "How to burn jews."
The number of users for each anti-Semitic term was tiny, and it
isn't clear if any advertiser actually used the hateful terms.
Still, the episode has again spotlighted Facebook's failure to
anticipate and detect how its platform can be manipulated for ill
purposes.
"We never intended or anticipated this functionality being used
this way -- and that is on us," Chief Operating Officer Sheryl
Sandberg said in a Facebook post Wednesday. "And we did not find it
ourselves -- and that is also on us."
Ms. Sandberg said Facebook would conduct more manual reviews of
new ad targeting options that automatically appear in its system.
It restored about 5,000 of the most common targeting terms used by
advertisers, such as "nurse", "teacher" or "dentistry," after
conducting a manual review of those topics.
Facebook has faced similar backlash for allowing violent videos
to broadcast over its live-streaming tool and misinformation to
proliferate across its network. This month, it disclosed that
Russian actors bought more than 5,000 ads with divisive political
messages during the presidential campaign, despite previously
saying it had no evidence of this activity.
Facebook has spent years developing its ability to pinpoint
consumers based on their interests, helping the company become a
digital-advertising platform of enormous scale and amass a market
value of $500 billion.
ProPublica's inquiry prompted Facebook to remove the
anti-Semitic categories, but the company later disabled some of its
targeting tools when that didn't fix the problem, Ms. Sandberg
said.
The "Jew hater" topics reached 2,274 people, according to
ProPublica. Advertisers could reach five people who said they
worked for "Jew Killing Weekly Magazine," The Wall Street Journal
found.
"The fact that hateful terms were even offered as options was
totally inappropriate and a fail on our part," Ms. Sandberg
said.
Ms. Sandberg didn't say how many human reviewers would be added
to oversee the ad system. A Facebook spokeswoman wouldn't
comment.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 20, 2017 19:09 ET (23:09 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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