Facebook's parent company Meta says it will remove sensitive ad targeting options related to health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion or sexual orientation beginning Jan. 19.
Currently, advertisers can target people who have expressed interest in issues, public figures or organizations connected to these topics. That information comes from tracking user activity on Facebook, Instagram and other platforms the company owns.
For instance, someone who's shown interest in "same-sex marriage" may be shown an ad from a nonprofit supporting same-sex marriage. But the categories could also be misused, and Meta, formerly Facebook, has been under intense scrutiny from regulators and the public to clean its platform of abuse and misinformation.
Meta Platforms Inc. said in a blog post Tuesday that the decision was "not easy and we know this change may negatively impact some businesses and organizations." Shares of the company closed at $335.37 Tuesday, down almost 1%.
"Some of our advertising partners have expressed concerns about these targeting options going away because of their ability to help generate positive societal change, while others understand the decision to remove them," wrote Graham Mudd, vice president of marketing and ads. "Like many of our decisions, this was not a simple choice and required a balance of competing interests where there was advocacy in both directions."
The Menlo Park, California-based company, which last year made $86 billion in revenue thanks in large part to its granular ad targeting options, has had a slew of problems with how it serves ads to its billions of users.
In 2019, Facebook said it would overhaul its ad-targeting systems to prevent discrimination in housing, credit and employment ads as part of a legal settlement. The social network said at the time it would no longer allow housing, employment or credit ads that target people by age, gender or zip code. It also limited other targeting options so these ads don't exclude people on the basis of race, ethnicity and other legally protected categories in the U.S., including national origin and sexual orientation.
After an uproar over its lack of transparency on political ads Facebook ran ahead of the 2016 election, a sharp contrast to how ads are regulated on traditional media, the company created an ad archive that includes details such as who paid for an ad and when it ran. But it does not share information about who gets served the ad.
Additional reporting by The Associated Press.
