Facebook to Prevent Ad Targeting to 'Sensitive' Groups Like Race, Religion

Meta (formerly Facebook) announced that it will prevent advertisers from using detailed targeting options relating to “sensitive” areas such as race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation across its Facebook and Instagram platforms.

The Verge reports that a recent post in the Meta for Business blog announced that Facebook and Instagram will be blocking advertisers from targeting users based on “sensitive” topics such as race, ethnicity, religious views, political beliefs, sexual orientation, health, and more.

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In the post, Meta Vice President for Marketing and Ads Graham Mudd wrote: “We’ve heard concerns from experts that targeting options like these could be used in ways that lead to negative experiences for people in underrepresented groups.”

Meta’s plans to remove “sensitive” detailed ad targeting options comes after the company faced a number of issues with the features in the past. The feature was previously used to target ads towards antisemitic users and to target housing, job, and credits ads by “multicultural affinity,” which excluded certain races.

Roy Austin Jr., Facebook’s VP of Civil Rights, commented on the decision in a tweet thread:

This wasn’t an easy decision. Some of our advertising partners have expressed concerns about these targeting options going away because of their ability to help generate positive societal change. We know this change will negatively impact some businesses and organizations. (3/4) https://t.co/RpQ6124CKQ

— Roy Austin, Jr. (@RAustin_Jr) November 9, 2021

While Meta is likely attempting to prevent any further scandals relating to the feature as the company hopes to gain a fresh start with its name rebrand, it is also likely that the decision has something to do with the outcome of the European Union’s efforts to form regulations that ban tracking-based advertising.

Meta’s advertising system is not able to effectively filter out certain areas, meaning that it would be difficult to ensure that no European users are caught up in a targeted advertising group, it is much simpler to remove the feature entirely.

Advertising is still an extremely lucrative area for the company which reported total advertising revenue of 28.2 billion in the third quarter of 2021.

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