Facebook allowed ads to target terms like 'Jew hater' and 'How to burn jews'
ProPublica’s
Julia Angwin, Madeline Varner, and Ariana Tobin have a disturbing
article about the ease with which they were able to buy advertising
space on Facebook that targeted clearly anti-semitic keywords and
phrases. These “categories,” weren’t ones the authors came up with, they
were provided by Facebook’s advertising system itself.
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 being contacted about this, Facebook pulled these phrases out
and blamed an algorithm that created the “categories.” This all comes
after weeks of revelations, including the fact that Facebook, after
denying there was any evidence for months, admitted to having sold at least $100,000 worth of advertising to Russian bot accounts,
and promoting right wing propaganda. The way an algorithm like the
anti-semitic one is created is clearly driven by an ability to match a
venn diagram of enough groups of people to make advertising targeting
attractive to any potential customer—even Hitler apparently. When the
reporters found “Jew hater,” the sample size was too small, unless coupled with some other “categories,” to buy an ad.
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.
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.”
ProPublica is clear to point out that the more heinously named
categories have very small numbers of people in comparison to the
majority Facebook patrons.
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