Facebook Inc said on
Friday it would no longer allow certain advertisers to exclude racial or ethnic
groups when placing ads on its service, following criticism that the practice
was discriminatory.
The move comes amid
growing scrutiny of how the world's largest online social media network's
policies and algorithms shape what content appears in a user's news feed.
The unexpected
victory of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election this week has
prompted questions over how much voters were swayed by inaccurate or misleading
news items shared on Facebook, mostly in favor of Trump.
Facebook will disable
use of the advertising tool, called 'ethnic affinities,' for ads that offer
housing, employment and the extension of credit; areas where certain groups
have historically faced discrimination, Facebook said in a blog post.
"There are many
non-discriminatory uses of our ethnic affinity solution in these areas, but we
have decided that we can best guard against discrimination by suspending these
types of ads," Erin Egan, Facebook's chief privacy officer, wrote. (bit.ly/2eZ8Eey)
Facebook collects vast amounts of data on its users, including photographs, allowing it to demographically categorize them in ways that allow advertisers to precisely target content to those they want to reach.
The company said it
will now use tools that automatically detect and disable ads offering housing,
employment or credit that rely on ethnic affinity marketing, Egan said. It will
also update its policies to more explicitly require advertisers to not engage
in discriminatory advertising.
The changes come two
weeks after ProPublica, a non-profit investigative news organization, published
an article showing how Facebook allowed advertisers to exclude groups on the
basis of ethnic affinities, a practice it said may violate federal housing and
civil rights laws passed in the 1960s.
A group of Facebook
users filed a lawsuit against the company after the ProPublica report, claiming
such ad targeting violated the Fair Housing Act and Civil Rights Act.
Facebook has attracted
criticism in recent months for how it polices several forms of content for its
1.8 billion users, including extremist propaganda, nudity and misleading or
inaccurate political articles, which have become known as 'fake news.'
The company has been
accused by some reporters, political observers and some in Silicon Valley of
helping Trump win Tuesday's election by doing little to limit the spread of
such items, many from dubious websites, on its service.
On Thursday,
Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg rejected those claims.
I think the idea
that fake news on Facebook, (which is) a very small amount of the content,
influenced the election in any way, is a pretty crazy idea," he said at a
technology conference in California.
Reuters
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