Meta, the social media company formerly known as Facebook, announced that it plans to eliminate the ability of advertisers to target their audiences through promotions based on interactions with content related to health, race and ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, orientation. sexual and other sensitive topics.
Your goal is to get rid of various options targeting of ads that “people may perceive as sensitive.” This means that, as of January 19, advertisers using Instagram and Facebook will no longer be able to send ads to users based on phrases such as “Presbyterian church,” “male marriage,” or “chemotherapy.”
This is not a novelty, already in 2018, Facebook removed 5,000 terms of targeting of advertisements related to religious and cultural interests, such as “Easter” and “Buddhism.” A year later, it limited the way that housing, employment and credit advertisers could target people after civil rights organizations (and a lawsuit from a fair housing group) alleged that the platform was used to discriminate. And, in July of this year, it prevented advertisers from targeting users under the age of 18 “based on their interests or their activities on other websites and applications.”
According to Meta, it is a decision made to “better match people’s changing expectations of how advertisers can reach them on our platform,” after hearing feedback from civil rights experts, legislators, and other stakeholders, Graham Mudd, Facebook Meta’s vice president of marketing and advertising, wrote on an internal blog, emphasizing that it was a “tough decision.”
These changes do not mean that Meta is out of the targeting of announcements. The company will still allow it for thousands of other categories, which some critics say will not prevent advertisers from using them to achieve similar targeting as the removed topics gave them, and would continue to use tools such as geographic targeting and that of analogous audiences.
Facebook Meta has had a tough few months: whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked a wealth of internal documents showing that the company was well aware of the damage it had caused.
The bottom line of the changes is that the options for targeting For interests that are being excluded, they are not based on people’s physical characteristics or personal attributes, but on things like people’s interactions with content on the platform.
Although Meta admits that the measure may “negatively affect some companies and organizations”, it affirmed that they maintain their commitment to satisfy “the needs of all the people we serve”.
With social media under scrutiny and with the inevitable growing regulation, Facebook’s rebranding and spinning, they appear to be an attempt to divert attention from its recent scandals, while allowing it to participate in a new arena in the world. that it may feel better positioned to shape new rules, which is particularly important to it as Facebook seeks to mitigate the business impact that Apple’s continued push for privacy has had on its advertising business.
But what is perhaps most striking is that Facebook is choosing to tie its new brand, Meta, to a product, the metaverse, which is highly uncertain and could take a decade or more to materialize, if at all.