Facebook was caught allowing advertisers to cater to those who have expressed interest in anti-Semitic topics on the social media platform, including “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” or, “History of ‘why jews ruin the world.'”
ProPublica tested whether these advertising categories existed and paid $30 to target those groups in three separate promoted articles or posts so the content would appear in the news feeds of those who had expressed interest in the anti-Semitic topics.
The promoted posts were approved within 15 minutes, according to ProPublica.
In response, ProPublica contacted Facebook, and the company then removed the categories. ProPublica explained that the algorithm generated the categories based on people’s declared interests. Additionally, Facebook said they would investigate ways to address this issue by implementing new restrictions on ad categories and screening them before making categories available to advertisers.
“There are times where content is surfaced on our platform that violates our standards,” said Rob Leathern, product management director at Facebook, told ProPublica. “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.”
Facebook came under fire this month after it was revealed the company sold $100,000 in ads to accounts linked to a Russian company during the 2016 election. Facebook handed over the information to special counsel Robert Mueller, who is heading the investigation to see if the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
