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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.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday September 25 2017, @04:55PM
You misunderstand me. I want to know who targeted the ads and what their content was, not so they can be censored, but so that (given the context of the election cycle when the ads were run) we can better understand who was trying to motivate such scumbags, and to what purpose.
Censorship isn't the answer. As Louis Brandeis [wikiquote.org] explained in his concurrence on Whitney v. California [wikipedia.org]:
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr