Update to Our Safety Commitments

We collaborate with industry partners who are also working to make online platforms safer for businesses and people. Last week the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), a global program in digital advertising, announced Facebook as one of the inaugural group of TAG Brand Safety Certified companies.

In September 2019 Facebook successfully completed the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards (JICWEBS) Digital Trading Standards Group’s brand safety audit. This meant that Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network were listed as Digital Trading Standards Group (DTSG) brand safety certified for demonstrating our commitment to brand protection and that we’ve taken the necessary steps to reduce the risk of unsafe ad placements.

With the recent completion of our 2020 audit, our certification now continues under the new TAG seal and is expanded from UK-only to a global certification.

“Brand safety is a cross-industry challenge that impacts every company in digital advertising, and addressing it will require companies across our supply chain to demonstrate their leadership and adopt the necessary high standards to protect themselves and their advertising partners,” says Mike Zaneis, CEO, TAG. “We are delighted to recognize Facebook as an inaugural recipient of the TAG Brand Safety Certified Seal, and we look forward to working with them as a close partner in this important effort."

We have also been working with Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) to align on brand safety standards and definitions, scaling education, common tools and systems, and independent oversight for the industry. We have aligned with GARM on the definitions for the 11 categories including hate speech and acts of aggression that are included in the GARM/4A’s Brand Safety Floor and Suitability Framework.

"This uncommon collaboration, brought together by the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, has aligned the industry on the brand safety floor and suitability framework, giving us all a unified language to move forward on the fight against hate online," says Carolyn Everson, VP Global Marketing Solutions, Facebook.

Read more about the Brand Safety Floor and Suitability Framework. (Updated on September 23, 2020 at 8:30AM PT to include new information about our work with GARM.)

Our work together with GARM will continue as the industry collectively focuses on GARM’s mission to create a more sustainable and responsible digital environment that protects the consumer, the media industry and society.

As more than 1.25 billion people visit Facebook Watch every month to discover and share videos from millions of creators and publishers, we’ve continued to invest in controls for in-stream placements.

Today we’re expanding where we provide suitability tools for in-stream that we’ve been testing to give advertisers more control over where their ads appear.

• Topic exclusion will offer in-stream advertisers a more granular exclusionary tool that allows for content-level suitability. Powered by machine learning technology, topic exclusion is designed to allow in-stream advertisers to choose content-level exclusions from four different topics: news, politics, gaming, and religious and spiritual content.
• Publisher allow lists for in-stream auction will provide advertisers the ability to select a list of publishers based on their own brand suitability criteria and deliver digital campaigns exclusively on the content from these publishers.