Under tremendous pressure and facing huge criticism for its advertisement policy which allowed Russian linked organisations to place advertisements on its platform to influence US Presidential Election and more recently some organisations were able to put advertisements to reach-out to ‘Jews haters’, social media giant Facebook has decided to manually approved advertisements targeted at people based on politics, religion, ethnicity or social issues before they go live.
According to a report, Facebook is bringing new updates that will require more human intervention before advertisements focused on politics, religion, ethnicity or social issues go live. “With this update, we’ll be requiring more ads to go through human review,” according to an e-mail Facebook sent to advertisers. “New campaigns with ad sets contain targetting options that we feel warrant additional review (such as those associated with topics such as politics, religion, ethnicity and social issues), we will route them for manual review prior to being approved,” reported American news portal.
According to multiple reports, the decision go for more human review comes after Facebook sever criticism of its platform being used by organisations for uncivility. In September, a ProPublica investigation had reported that Facebook helped 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”. Facebook ads are generally bought and uploaded to the site through an automated system.
The new policy that Facebook is planning to implement sets a higher standard for the ads targeted at people affiliated to particular political, religious or ethnic groups, said report. It also observed that that the new policy could slow down the launch of new ad campaigns. Both Facebook and Twitter are facing intense scrutiny over the presence of Russia-linked ads on its platform during the 2016 American presidential election. They are set to appear before the US Congress on November 1 to testify.
