Facebook Allowed Target Advertising to ‘Jew Haters’

Facebook Promoting Anti-Semitic Advertising?

They just don’t seem capable of avoiding controversy at the moment. That being said, this most recent revelation is mind-blowing, even by Facebook gaff standards. Before you ask again, yes you did read that title correctly.

So, what have they done this time? Well, a report via CNET reports that Facebook was allowing for key word advertising searched which included antisemitic phrases. Like what you might be asking?

Such examples included:

• Jew Hater
• How to burn Jews
• History of why Jews ruin the world

Very shocking stuff and clearly a highly embarrassing thing to come out of social media website.

We recently reported how Facebook had hired over 3000 staff to specifically deal with ‘hate speech’. This apparently did not include their own in-house practices.

Advertising revenue is obviously quite an important factor for Facebook and as such, targeted advertising is a critical matter. This antisemitic targeted advertising certainly takes the shine off their recent record profits. Albeit, this type of targeted advertising was not deliberate.

Please tell me they are not still doing this?

No, they are not. Better late than never I guess. There is, however, understandably a lot of pressure to understand how these keywords made their listings at all. They, after all, highly controversial.

Automatic generation based on user inputs is being blamed for the incident. In fairness, a fairly legitimate and believable excuse, but never the less, still very embarrassing.

Rob Leathern, product management director at Facebook has said: “Our community standards strictly prohibit attacking people based on their protected characteristics, including religion, and we prohibit advertisers from discriminating against people based on religion and other attributes, however, there are times where content is surfaced on our platform that violates our standards.”

Maybe Facebook needs to have a quick glance over those guidelines again.

So, yes, very likely a genuine mistake. Mark Zuckerberg himself is Jewish. Therefore it would be ironic if the social media giant was genuinely antisemitic. It still remains, however, another embarrassing matter for Facebook to deal with.