Politics, health, religion and sexual orientation removed from ad targeting

This is a major change. Facebook and Instagram users will soon no longer be able to be targeted by ads based on their interest in certain sensitive topics, such as sexual orientation and political affiliation. “We want to better meet the changing expectations of people on the methods of advertisers,” Graham Mudd, vice president of advertising for the California group, said on Tuesday.

Advertisers love the ability to target consumers very finely and at a very large scale. So far, they can choose from categories of interests, into which users are placed based on the pages they viewed or the ads they clicked on. But starting January 19, thousands of these categories will be removed.

Sexual orientations, health, politics …

Among them are those relating to sexual orientation (“gay marriage”, “LGBT culture”), health problems (“chemotherapy”, “world diabetes day”), religious practices (“Catholic Church”, “holidays Jews ”), political affiliations, ethnicity, etc. The idea is to prevent organizations from misusing these categories by encouraging people to do wrong or dangerous things.

Last January, the Tech Transparency Project site denounced ads for gun cases or bulletproof vests targeting members of far-right groups on Facebook before the riots in Washington. US housing authorities also filed lawsuits in 2019 against Facebook, accused of allowing real estate ads that “exclude people of color, families with children, women and people with disabilities.”

Give users more control

In the statement, Graham Mudd said the decision, “difficult to make”, is based on feedback from civil rights experts and lawmakers. “We know that this can affect certain companies and organizations,” admits the vice-president. They can use other tools, such as targeting people who have interacted directly with their brand or geolocation, for example. The platform has also already taken steps to give users themselves more control over the type of ads they want to see, or see less, and plans to add categories early next year, such as games and games. ‘money or diets.

Formerly Facebook, recently renamed Meta, the parent company of the family of social applications is going through a major reputation crisis linked to the revelations of a whistleblower, who accuses it of putting its profits before its users. The company achieved a turnover of 84 billion dollars (72.7 billion euros) in 2020, mainly thanks to advertising revenue.