Facebook changes policy to stop discriminatory ads, won't let ads target users on basis of race, religion

HIGHLIGHTS

• Facebook has announced changes to its ad policy.
• These changes are applicable to housing, employment and credit ads.
• Advertisers will now get fewer categories to target their ads.

Facebook has announced a lot of changes to its platform of lately. Owing to the string of scandals and data breaches that plagued its platform last year and the governmental scrutiny that took place in the following days, the company has taken active steps to increase privacy and transparency on its platform. And now, Facebook is changing is ad policy in a bid to stop its discriminatory ad targeting on its platform.

"Our policies already prohibit advertisers from using our tools to discriminate. We've removed thousands of categories from targeting related to protected classes such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion. But we can do better," Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg wrote in a blog.

As a part of the changes, the social media giant has announced changes to the ad policy on its platform pertaining to housing, employment and credit related ads. This means that advertisers who want to run a housing, an employment or a credit ad on Facebook would no longer be allowed to target ads based on age, gender or zip code of people and that they would get fewer categories to target their ads.

Additionally, any detailed targeting option describing or appearing to be related to the protected classes will also be unavailable.

Besides this, Facebook is also building a tool which can be used by the Facebook users across the US to search see all current housing ads that have been targeted to different places across the country.

The changes come as a part of Facebook's settlement with civil rights organisations that accused the social media giant of allowing the advertisers on its platform of discriminating against minorities and older people using its targeting model. And it represents an important move by the company as its micro-ad targeting model has been an important revenue source for the company.

Meanwhile, ad-targeting is not the only change that Facebook is making to its platform. Earlier this month, company's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg detailed a plan that would increase privacy and encryption on Facebook's platform including sister apps like Messenger and WhatsApp.

SOURCE