Sheryl Sandberg says Facebook to reinforce ad targeting following anti-Semitic “fail”

Facebook, the social media giant, is reinforcing commands on its advertising targeting tools. The move of policy change came after a distressing ProPublica’s report that the ad-buying system of the company enabled its advertisers to aim users interested in anti-Semitic topics. Following reporting discovered further bigoted terms in the system of Facebook that can be utilized to target advertisements.

Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, in a blog post said, “The fact that hateful terms were even offered as options were totally inappropriate and a fail on our part. We never intended or anticipated this functionality being used this way—and that is on us. And we did not find it ourselves—and that is also on us.”

Facebook recently had accepted that an influence operation perhaps based in Russia procured $100,000 worth of advertisements on its platform to endorse divisive political & social messages. CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, had earlier said that the notion that “fake news” on its interface had swayed the results of the presidential election held in 2016 was “a pretty crazy idea”, even though the sales team of the company itself hypes its potential to “considerably change voter intent” via the Facebook commercials.

The bigoted sorts surfaced as selections for ad targeting as the social media giant utilizes an algorithm to create the choices on the basis of what the users have written in their user profiles regarding their work history & education. For instance, around 2300 users of Facebook have written that they studied “Jew hater” in the institution on their profiles, automatically creating the catchphrase as an advertising target.

Such targeting categories are been disabled by Facebook after the report by ProPublica and now is restoring only those targeting choices that have been looked over by a human, according to Sandberg. She said that the company will involve additional human oversight and review to their automated processes. Further, she also mentioned that the company was producing a tool for users to notify about the mistreatment of the ad system and “expounding its advertising rules and reinforcing its enforcement methods” to warrant that ad targeting was not utilized in a manner that breached the “community standards” of Facebook.

Previously, in February, Facebook had restructured its advertising policies to deal with the criticism that the facility for advertisers to eliminate users on the basis of their “ethnic affinity” allowed the advertisers to violate the US anti-discrimination regulations. Since long, the privacy advocates have raised concerns regarding the targeting degrees enabled by the huge aggregation of private information by Facebook.

Hope, Facebook is able to put all things in place as soon as possible.