Facebook To Overhaul Ad Platform

Facebook Inc has agreed to change its paid advertising platform as part of a wide-ranging settlement to prevent discriminatory and “harmful” practices, the company and U.S. civil rights groups said on Tuesday.

According to Reuters, Facebook will create a new advertising portal for ads linked to housing, employment and credit ads that will limit targeting options for those ads across all of its services, including Instagram and Messenger, the rights groups said in a joint statement.

Advertisers on the portal, which will be separate from the system used to advertise other sets of services, will not be able to target ads by age, gender, cultural affinity or zip code, the statement said.

They will also be required to use a minimum geographic radius for location-based targeting to prevent the exclusion of certain communities.

In addition, the company pledged to build a tool allowing users to search all current housing ads listed in the United States, regardless of whether the ads were directed at them.

“There is a long history of discrimination in the areas of housing, employment and credit, and this harmful behavior should not happen through Facebook ads,” Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said in a separate statement.

Facebook, the world’s largest social network with 2.7 billion users and nearly $56 billion in annual revenue, has been on the defensive over its advertising practices, while also fending off privacy scandals and disclosures that Russia used its platform to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Complaints over ads-based discrimination have dogged the company since 2016, when news organization ProPublica reported that advertisers could target ads on Facebook based on people’s self-reported jobs, even if the job was “Jew hater.”

In 2016, a report from the nonprofit journalism group ProPublica raised the first questions about how advertisers could use sophisticated targeting tools on Facebook that violated the Fair Housing Act. It was possible to exclude targets with certain "ethnic affinities," people who were not technically identified as a certain race but who shared interests that aligned with certain races, like Native American, African American and Hispanic.

AdAge reports the report sparked concerns that housing, employment and credit advertisers could avoid showing opportunities to certain groups of people.

Since then, Facebook has implemented changes including eliminating ethnic affinities targeting for the sensitive advertising categories. It also created new warning that popped up in its ad platform requiring advertisers to certify that they would comply with anti-discriminatory ad laws.