Facebook Stops Race-Based Marketing For Some Ads

Facebook has bowed down to pressure from lawmakers and civil rights groups and announced that it will stop its so-called “ethnic affinity marketing” for some advertisements, so that it can better prevent discrimination on the social network. The company's policies already ban discriminatory ad content. Until the announcement, Facebook allowed advertisers to use “ethnic affinity” and other parameters such as gender, age, favorite movies, food preferences and geography to determine user-targeted ads. Recently, policymakers and civil rights leaders have expressed concerns that advertisers could misuse some aspects of our affinity marketing segments. Specifically, they’ve raised the possibility that some advertisers might use these segments to run ads that discriminate against people, particularly in areas where certain groups have historically faced discrimination — housing, employment and the extension of credit," Erin Egan, Facebook's vice president on U.S. public policy and chief privacy officer, said in an official blog post Friday.