Reviewing Targeting to Ensure Advertising is Safe and Civil

We believe advertising should be safe and civil. It should not divide or discriminate. This guides the way we create and enforce our ad policies, build our products and educate advertisers.

It also applies to targeting. Across traditional and digital advertising, a business's success depends on finding the right customers. Targeted advertising helps millions of businesses grow each year by connecting them with customers. It also helps people see more relevant ads and connect with businesses in more meaningful ways. We know how valuable targeting is for businesses and for people, and we're committed to ensuring it's done in a safe and civil way. That's why we've been closely reviewing the targeting options we offer. Today, we're providing an update on this review and the ongoing improvements we're making to targeting on our platforms based on our findings and feedback from privacy, data ethics and civil rights experts, as well as charitable and advocacy organizations.

Our goal is to catch ads that violate our policies before they run on Facebook. This means hiring more people to review ads and building better machine learning systems to review ads as well. We're also doing more to help advertisers understand their obligations under our policies, including the policies that prohibit use of our tools to wrongfully discriminate. That's why we're introducing new prompts that remind advertisers about our anti-discrimination policies before they create a campaign and when using our exclusion tools. This serves as a reminder for advertisers of their obligation to follow our policies and the law.

When we identify ads offering housing, employment or credit, we require the advertiser to certify that they are complying with our anti-discrimination policy and with applicable anti-discrimination law. We're always improving our systems to identify these kinds of ads and reject ads from businesses that have declined to certify compliance. These systems reject thousands of such ads per day.

Even though targeting is an important tool to reach people, we have heard concerns about potential abuse, particularly about the feature that lets advertisers exclude people from their ads. Advertisers want to show ads to people most likely to be interested in their offerings, and exclusion targeting helps avoid showing ads to people who likely aren't interested. For example, if a local basketball team is trying to attract new fans, they can exclude people who are already interested in the team.

While exclusion targeting can be a useful tool, we also understand concerns we've heard about potential abuse. In response to the feedback we've received, we've removed thousands of categories from exclusion targeting. We focused mainly on topics that relate to potentially sensitive personal attributes, such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion.

Our review is continuous; the process will be ongoing and we'll continue soliciting feedback. We take our responsibility to keep advertising safe and civil seriously, and we will keep exploring more ways to make targeting work for people and businesses.