Facebook COO ‘disgusted’ by ad targeting tools, will add more human oversight

Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg announced new steps her company is taking in response to the discovery that advertisers could target individuals who expressed interest in racist and bigoted categories.

Previously, advertisers could direct their ads toward anti-Semitic individuals who listed in their Facebook profiles “how to burn Jews” and other bigoted terms, ProPublica revealed.

Facebook’s ad tool would prompt ad buyers to select terms like  “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” or, “History of ‘why jews ruin the world.’ ” The prompts were created by users typing in various racist and bigoted phrases in their education and profession fields on Facebook.

{mosads}“Seeing those words made me disgusted and disappointed — disgusted by these sentiments and disappointed that our systems allowed this,” Sandberg said, noting that a team of human reviewers had since reviewed all 5,000 of Facebook’s potential categories for advertisers.

Sandberg says that Facebook plans to curb future hateful categories in its advertising options by continuing to have people, as opposed to algorithms, review new ad categories.

The COO also noted that the company is “working to create a program to encourage people on Facebook to report potential abuses of our ads system to us directly.”

“We have long had a firm policy against hate on Facebook,” Sandberg wrote. “We hope these changes will prevent abuses like this going forward.”

Facebook had previously received criticism over its ad tools last October when ProPublica reported that advertisers could set up housing ads that discriminate against black, Hispanic and Asian-American’s — potentially violating housing discrimination laws.

The company has more recently been an object of scrutiny for its role in potential Kremlin interference in the 2016 election. Media reports and Facebook’s own admissions have revealed Russian political ad buys and events for pro-Trump rallies on Facebook being set up by groups linked to Moscow allies.

Lawmakers have said that they would like to see Facebook reveal more information as to the extent of Russian actors using its platform to possibly sway the election.