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posted by martyb on Monday September 25 2017, @01:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the keeping-an-eye-on-things dept.

Facebook has tightened the reins on its ad-targeting capabilities following a ProPublica investigation that found that Facebook's algorithmically generated categories allowed advertisements to be targeted to individuals who used phrases associated with anti-Semitism. Facebook denied that an algorithm was to blame, instead blaming manual entries by Facebook users (such as listing your occupation as "Jew Hater" with education from "Hitler's School of Hard Knocks"):

In a [September 20th post], Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg made her first public statement on a recent ProPublica investigation of ad-targeting to hate groups, calling the issue "a fail on our part." Last week, ProPublica's investigation found that Facebook clients could target ads using keywords like "jew hater" and "Hitler did nothing wrong."

Sandberg claims the ad-targeting was the result of manual entries in the education and employer fields. (In simple terms, someone listed their job as "jew hater.") That explanation contradicts the initial ProPublica article, which claimed the categories were algorithmically generated. "We never intended or anticipated this functionality being used this way – and that is on us," Sandberg wrote. "And we did not find it ourselves – and that is also on us."

Sandberg laid out three changes in how the company targets ads, although each is largely an extension of existing efforts. After restricting self-reported fields for education and profession, Facebook will now restore approximately 5,000 of the most popular responses, all of which have now been reviewed to ensure they don't violate company standards. The company will also devote more resources to ensuring that "content that goes against our community standards cannot be used to target ads," and add more human oversight to its advertising system more broadly.

Facebook now has a vetted list of around 5,000 targeting options (such as "nurse" or "teacher") and will manually approve new ones.

Also at Recode, Slate, and Marketing Land.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Monday September 25 2017, @03:04PM

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Monday September 25 2017, @03:04PM (#572677) Homepage Journal

    Just holding the views. Not even expressing them necessarily. That's all. Simply holding the thought. I'm disappointed that such a small percentage of my fellow Americans believe in freedom of thought. I guess it's no surprise "thought police" is a real thing now. A real danger.

    An interesting point. At the same time, we were not given the actual text of the survey questions from which the responses were elicited. The respondents may have assumed (as I did) that finding such views "acceptable" was an endorsement of them.

    I fell victim to that (perhaps incorrect) assumption myself (see my reply to an AC here [soylentnews.org]). As such, it isn't so far fetched that others may have made that assumption.

    Freedom of thought and expression are essential to a truly free society. Those who are, in fact, nazis and white supremacists have every right to their thoughts and expression, however disgusting. In fact, those are exactly the sorts of people whose expression *must* be defended vigorously. If we don't defend unpopular speech, any and all speech and expression are at risk.

    Given that I find the bigoted and exclusionary ideas of the nazis/white supremacists to be not just wrong from a logical standpoint, I find them disgusting and repugnant. As such, I am free to denounce such ideas and the worthless scum who subscribe to those ideas. I do not, however, believe the government should punish them simply for holding those views. [xkcd.com]

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
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