Facebook takes action against discriminatory ad practices

After a raft of negative news stories about the misuse of its platform Facebook takes further action against discrimination

Facebook ads are a complicated business. Correctly targeting the audience that you want to see your ads can be the difference between a successful ad campaign and a dismal failure. Unfortunately, the way Facebook has set up its ad targeting system allows nefarious groups to hide their ads from certain subsets of society. If these subsets are based on ethnicity or religion, then this represents unacceptable discrimination. Facebook is now acting to remove such discrimination from its network.

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In a blog post, Facebook has announced that it plans to remove 5,000 ad targeting options that allow people to exclude Facebook users based on ethnicity or religious belief. Facebook said:

“While these options have been used in legitimate ways to reach people interested in a certain product or service, we think minimizing the risk of abuse is more important.”

This latest move by Facebook will be welcomed by several organizations who’ve complained about discriminatory practices across the Facebook network. One such complainant was (HUD) the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development, which accused Facebook of giving landlords the ability to discriminate against people based on their sex, marital status, religion, race, and various other facets of their identity.

With Facebook stumbling from crisis to crisis, and trust in the social network at an all-time low, this move is just the latest in a string of moves aimed at getting Facebook back in everybody’s good graces. It is good to see Facebook finally acting to police the behavior of bad people across its network, but it is a real shame that it has taken billions upon billions of dollars being wiped off Facebook’s stock value for the social network to act.

We’ll be monitoring Facebook over the next few weeks to see the effect this new move has on the network. Make sure you stick with us for all the latest Facebook news.