Facebook’s new parent company Meta plans to reduce targeted advertising and promotions on its platforms based around controversial topics such as health, race and ethnicity, political affiliation, religion and sexual orientation, among other classifications, the New York Times reported. The company said it wants to limit the way its targeting tools can be abused. The change will start on 19 January, affecting advertisers on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, as well as Meta's audience network, which places ads in third-party apps.
“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 VP for product marketing Graham Mudd said. He added that the policies will likely be be unpopular with some, but that the company had decided that moving forward was the best course.
The company will continue to use ad-targeting in general, allowing tens of thousands of other categories. It will also continue to use tools such as location targeting. Users, who can already limit exposure to ads about topics such as politics and alcohol, will be able to block more, such as promotions related to gambling and weight loss, from early next year.
Meta relies on targeted advertising for most of its USD 86 billion in annual revenue but has increasingly come under fire about advertisers abusing these targeting abilities. It has already made changes to its ad-targeting tools, removing 5,000 classifications in 2018 to keep advertisers from excluding certain users.
The announcement coincides with the release of the company's latest quarterly report on enforcing its community standards. Meta said that changes in the past year to its news feed technology have already helped reduce the prevalence of hate speech and problematic content on its platforms significantly.
The share of hate speech dropped to 0.03 percent of all content views on Facebook, or 3 views for every 10,000 pieces of content viewed, from 0.07-0.08 percent in Q4 2020. The same measure was at 0.02 percent for Instagram in Q3, the first time the group reported this figure.
