Google, Facebook And Twitter All Allow You To Target Ads To White Nationalists — Here's What's Going On
Thursday evening, ProPublica reported that Facebook has been allowing advertisers to directly target users with hateful ideologies, following reports that Russian operatives placed Facebook ads about divisive social issues during the election. Since ProPublica's report, several other tech companies have been found to allow advertisers to similarly target their ads. Here's what you need to know.
Facebook Allowed Advertisers To Target People Interested In 'Jew Hater' And Other Antisemitic Topics
Thursday, ProPublica reported that until Facebook was notified by reporters, the social media company allowed advertisers to target their ads at people who expressed interests such as "Jew hater," How to burn jews" and "why jews ruin the world." Facebook's algorithm would even suggest similarly hateful interests, such as "Hitler did nothing wrong," to advertisers.
The report raises obvious ethical questions about Facebook not only potentially profiting off of hate speech and ideology, and also allowing people to post interest in those ideas in the first place.
Going further, ProPublica successfully ran ads targeted at antisemitic users:
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 by ProPublica, Facebook removed the antisemitic categories.
Making matters uglier for the company, even after Facebook was alerted to the categories by ProPublica, Slate was able to generate ads targeting those interested in "Ku-Klux-Klan," among other topics associated with white nationalism.
Facebook Has Had Multiple Ad-Targeting Disasters In The Last Year
Last year, ProPublica revealed that Facebook allowed advertisers to exclude users with an "affinity" for various racial groups from seeing ads for housing and employment, even though it's illegal to racially discriminate against people seeking housing and jobs. Facebook responded by claiming that they would create a system to detect such parameters.
Last week, The Washington Post reported that Russian interlopers had used fake profiles to create ads that "appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights."
On Monday, The Daily Beast reported that the profiles had also apparently created events used to organize anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rallies in Idaho during the election.
Google Was Found To Allow Similar Ad Targeting
On Friday, BuzzFeed found that Google had similar problems in its own ad targeting, allowing advertisers to target their ads to people who search hateful phrases such as "black people ruin everything" and "jews control the media."
Just like Facebook, Google autosuggested similar phrases, such as "the evil jew." Like ProPublica, BuzzFeed ran the ads and confirmed their appearance on the web.
Google had a similar response to Facebook, removing the terms from their system and telling BuzzFeed:
"Our goal is to prevent our keyword suggestions tool from making offensive suggestions, and to stop any offensive ads appearing. We have language that informs advertisers when their ads are offensive and therefore rejected. In this instance, ads didn't run against the vast majority of these keywords, but we didn't catch all these offensive suggestions. That's not good enough and we're not making excuses. We've already turned off these suggestions, and any ads that made it through, and will work harder to stop this from happening again."
[BuzzFeed]
Twitter Allows You To Target People Interested In Racial Slurs
Shortly after BuzzFeed published its report, The Daily Beast reported that Twitter also allows disturbing targeting of ads, allowing advertisers target millions of customers interested in the terms "w*tback" and "n**ger." As with the other reports, The Daily Beast was able to successfully launch test ads.
As with Facebook and Google, Twitter generated suggestions in response to disturbing keywords:
Type in the keyword "Hitler," and Twitter Ads suggested we target people with interests similar to accounts with handles including @AdolfHitler_ and @SecretHitler.
Twitter has not issued a statement on the report.
