Facebook Enabled Advertisers to Reach ‘Jew Haters’
Facebook Enabled Advertisers to Reach ‘Jew Haters’
After being contacted by ProPublica, Facebook removed
several anti-Semitic ad categories and promised to improve monitoring.
by Julia Angwin, Madeleine Varner and Ariana Tobin Sept. 14, 4 p.m. EDT
Want to market Nazi memorabilia, or recruit marchers for
a far-right rally? Facebook’s self-service ad-buying platform had the right
audience for you.
Until this week, when we asked Facebook about it, the
world’s largest social network enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to
the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of
“Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” or, “History of ‘why jews ruin the world.’”
To test if these ad categories were real, we paid $30 to
target those groups with three “promoted posts” — in which a ProPublica article
or post was displayed in their news feeds. Facebook approved all three ads
within 15 minutes.
After we contacted Facebook, it removed the anti-Semitic
categories — which were created by an algorithm rather than by people — and
said it would explore ways to fix the problem, such as limiting the number of
categories available or scrutinizing them before they are displayed to buyers.
“There are times where content is surfaced on our
platform that violates our standards,” said Rob Leathern, product management
director at Facebook. “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’s advertising has become a focus of national
attention since it disclosed last week that it had discovered $100,000 worth of
ads placed during the 2016 presidential election season by “inauthentic”
accounts that appeared to be affiliated with Russia.
Like many tech companies, Facebook has long taken a hands
off approach to its advertising business. Unlike traditional media companies
that select the audiences they offer advertisers, Facebook generates its ad
categories automatically based both on what users explicitly share with
Facebook and what they implicitly convey through their online activity.
Traditionally, tech companies have contended that it’s
not their role to censor the Internet or to discourage legitimate political
expression. In the wake of the violent protests in Charlottesville by
right-wing groups that included self-described Nazis, Facebook and other tech
companies vowed to strengthen their monitoring of hate speech.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote at the time that
“there is no place for hate in our community,” and pledged to keep a closer eye
on hateful posts and threats of violence on Facebook. “It’s a disgrace that we
still need to say that neo-Nazis and white supremacists are wrong — as if this
is somehow not obvious,” he wrote.
But Facebook apparently did not intensify its scrutiny of
its ad buying platform. In all likelihood, the ad categories that we spotted
were automatically generated because people had listed those anti-Semitic
themes on their Facebook profiles as an interest, an employer or a “field of
study.” Facebook’s algorithm automatically transforms people’s declared
interests into advertising categories.
This is not the first controversy over Facebook’s ad
categories. Last year, ProPublica was able to block an ad that we bought in
Facebook’s housing categories from being shown to African-Americans, Hispanics
and Asian-Americans, raising the question of whether such ad targeting violated
laws against discrimination in housing advertising. After ProPublica’s article
appeared, Facebook built a system that it said would prevent such ads from
being approved.
Last year, ProPublica also collected a list of the
advertising categories Facebook was providing to advertisers. We downloaded
more than 29,000 ad categories from Facebook’s ad system — and found categories
ranging from an interest in “Hungarian sausages” to “People in households that
have an estimated household income of between $100K and $125K.”
At that time, we did not find any anti-Semitic
categories, but we do not know if we captured all of Facebook’s possible ad
categories, or if these categories were added later. A Facebook spokesman
didn’t respond to a question about when the categories were introduced.
Last week, acting on a tip, we logged into Facebook’s
automated ad system to see if “Jew hater” was really an ad category. We found
it, but discovered that the category — with only 2,274 people in it — was too
small for Facebook to allow us to buy an ad pegged only to Jew haters.
Facebook’s automated system suggested “Second Amendment”
as an additional category that would boost our audience size to 119,000 people,
presumably because its system had correlated gun enthusiasts with anti-Semites.
The site shows users how Facebook categorizes them. It
doesn’t reveal the data it is buying about their offline lives.
Instead, we chose additional categories that popped up
when we typed in “jew h”: “How to burn Jews,” and “History of ‘why jews ruin
the world.’” Then we added a category that Facebook suggested when we typed in
“Hitler”: a category called “Hitler did nothing wrong.” All were described as
“fields of study.”
These ad categories were tiny. Only two people were
listed as the audience size for “how to burn jews,” and just one for “History
of ‘why jews ruin the world.’” Another 15 people comprised the viewership for
“Hitler did nothing wrong.”
Facebook’s automated system told us that we still didn’t
have a large enough audience to make a purchase. So we added “German
Schutzstaffel,” commonly known as the Nazi SS, and the “Nazi Party,” which were
both described to advertisers as groups of “employers.” Their audiences were
larger: 3,194 for the SS and 2,449 for Nazi Party.
Still, Facebook said we needed more — so we added people
with an interest in the National Democratic Party of Germany, a far-right,
ultranationalist political party, with its much larger viewership of 194,600.
Once we had our audience, we submitted our ad — which
promoted an unrelated ProPublica news article. Within 15 minutes, Facebook
approved our ad, with one change. In its approval screen, Facebook described
the ad targeting category “Jew hater” as “Antysemityzm,” the Polish word for
anti-Semitism. Just to make sure it was referring to the same category, we
bought two additional ads using the term “Jew hater” in combination with other
terms. Both times, Facebook changed the ad targeting category “Jew hater” to
“Antisemityzm” in its approval.
A few days later, Facebook sent us the results of our
campaigns. Our three ads reached 5,897 people, generating 101 clicks, and 13
“engagements” — which could be a “like” a “share” or a comment on a post.
Since we contacted Facebook, most of the anti-Semitic
categories have disappeared.
Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne said that they didn’t
appear to have been widely used. “We have looked at the use of these audiences
and campaigns and it’s not common or widespread,” he said.
We looked for analogous advertising categories for other
religions, such as “Muslim haters.” Facebook didn’t have them.
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