On Thursday, ProPublica reported that Facebook had approved ads targeted using audience categories that included “Jew hater,” “Hitler did nothing wrong” and “how to burn jews.”
On Thursday, ProPublica reported that Facebook had approved ads targeted using audience categories that included “Jew hater,” “Hitler did nothing wrong” and “how to burn jews.”
The more than 2 billion people that use Facebook every month provide it with information: how old they are, who their friends are, where they live, who they work for, where they went to school, what music they like and more. It’s a prodigious amount of information. And, because of Facebook’s access to that data, it has made an immense sum of money selling ads to advertisers who want to reach not only 18- to 34-year-olds in the US, but 18- to 34-year-olds in the US who are in a new relationship and also in the military.
Facebook can do this because people tell it things like when they’ve entered a new relationship or if they work for the US Army. But people can lie. More problematically, Facebook can’t tell when people are lying.
Point of fact: On Thursday, ProPublica reported that Facebook had approved ads targeted using audience categories that included “Jew hater,” “Hitler did nothing wrong” and “how to burn jews.” The absurdity of the idea of Facebook pooling together people associated with such hateful characteristics for brands to advertise to — so that Facebook could profit — is only overshadowed by the fact that Facebook did. Worse, Facebook wasn’t aware of what it had done.
How this happened
No human being at Facebook created ad-targeting options that let advertisers pay to reach people affiliating themselves with hate, such as individuals who list “NaziParty” as their employer. A computer did. An algorithm developed by Facebook crawled users’ profiles, identified patterns in the data and created new audience segments based on that information.
In this case, enough people had typed “NaziParty” as their employer or “Jew hater” as their educational field of study on their Facebook profiles that the computer decided that these people warranted their own grouping, in the same way that people who work for AT&T or studied supply-chain management might.
The algorithm did not know that the Nazi Party was a German political party that oversaw a mass genocide or that “Jew hater” is an alternative descriptor for anti-Semites and that grouping together people who identify as such constitutes organizing a hate group.
It only knew that the sequences of letters that people inputted as the names of their employers, schools, job titles and fields of study appeared on thousands of people’s profiles and that a group of thousands is a group that may be valuable to an advertiser.
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With all Facebook's employees, wouldn't you think it had been someone's job to make sure that "jew-haters" are not categorized as a group to be appealed to with advertising on their web site?
OY!
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Years ago when Facebook started to be popular I know I registered with it. Then I got to hear from a lot of people I had not been in contact with for many years, even some old neighbours. Then China blocked it, as they did with google and its gmail, and YouTube. Then I decided I didn't want to have my name on Facebook any more, or any personal information I might have posted, but had no way to cancel it all out. At this point I wish I never had anything to do with it. It is Orwellian, and I have NO respect for Zucker...whatever other than the fact that he was smart enough to marry a Chinese woman.
Minds.com literally has a group called, "Hitler was right".