Facebook is removing over 5,000 targeting options to help prevent misuse, including the ability to exclude audiences that relate to attributes such as ethnicity or religion.
The company announced the changes in a blog post Tuesday. The changes come in response to a complaint from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development filed against Facebook. The complaint accuses the platform of helping landlords and home sellers violate the Fair Housing Act by letting them target only certain demographics.
Highlights:
- Facebook will require all U.S. advertisers to certify compliance with its nondiscrimination policy in the Ads Manager tool in order to continue advertising on the platform.
- Advertisers identified as offering housing, employment or credit have already been required to certify that they comply with the policy.
- Facebook says that while these categories were used by some advertisers for perfectly legitimate reasons, and that any advertisers who used them for discriminatory purposes did so in violation of Facebook’s terms of service.
Go deeper:
- Keeping Advertising Safe and Civil – Facebook
- Facebook kills 5K ad targeting options to combat discriminatory practices – Marketing Dive
- Facebook is removing over 5,000 ad targeting options to prevent discriminatory ads – TechCrunch
