Yesterday, Facebook announced the ability for advertisers to target their campaigns based on a user’s employer and education will be removed from the advertising platform.
The decision comes after ProPublica, an investigative reporting publication, found that advertisers could target discriminatory groups such as “Jew Haters” and “NaziParty” in their ad campaigns.
To address this, Facebook has removed these targeting fields, saying they will not be added back until the “right processes” are in place to prevent the issue.
Emphasizing its focus on building a safe community, the post ends with “we want Facebook to be a safe place for people and businesses, and we’ll continue to do everything we can to keep hate off Facebook.”
How did this happen?
Several thousands of Facebook users have chosen to input offensive terms in their profile under fields like employer, field of study, and job title.
Facebook’s software automatically generates these targeting options in its ad manager. As of now, there is no process that inhibits any offensive or inappropriate options from appearing when advertisers conduct a search to build their target audiences.
What does this mean for advertisers?
Depending on your business, the impact of this can vary.
If you’re reaching a B2B audience through your Facebook campaigns, this could potentially damage the short-term future of your campaigns, as these fields are often critical to building a strong, business-focused target audience. Building a campaign based on other targeting options, such as interests, may have negative results for B2B marketers since they tend to favor consumer-focused goals.
However, advertisers with existing campaigns that use these targeting options (employer and education) are still in the ad set:
But, as expected, they do not have the ability to access these targeting options to add more fields.
For advertisers relying on these targeting options to round off their 2017 marketing budget (like me, *raises hand*), it may be wise to develop a backup plan.
Although the post did say the removal was temporary, Facebook did not provide a time frame for when advertisers could expect these options to return.
What does it mean for Facebook?
As Facebook continues to face discriminatory advertising and censorship issues, this discovery of user-based deception is yet another hurdle for the social network to overcome.
While Facebook has added the functionality for advertisers to report a targeting option as inappropriate (see below), it’s still likely this issue will prove difficult to monitor and fully extinguish.
