9/22/2017 Google and Facebook Face Criticism for Ads Targeting Racist Sentiments - The New York Times

https://nyti.ms/2y367Jf

BUSINESS DAY

Google and Facebook Face Criticism for

Ads Targeting Racist Sentiments
By SAPNA MAHESHWARI and ALEXANDRA STEVENSON SEPT. 15, 2017
Google and Facebook, the worlds biggest sellers of online advertising, faced sharp
criticism on Friday for allowing advertisers to direct ads to users who searched for or
expressed an interest in racist sentiments and hate speech.

In response to two separate news reports exposing the issues, both companies
said they would change how their systems worked.

The criticism began on Thursday after a report from ProPublica, a nonprofit

news site, revealed that Facebook enabled advertisers to seek out self-described Jew
haters and other anti-Semitic topics. The company responded by saying that it
would restrict how advertisers targeted their audiences on the social network.

On Friday, an article from BuzzFeed reported how Google allowed the sale of
ads tied to racist and bigoted keywords, and automatically suggested more offensive
terms as part of that process. By midday, Google said it would work harder to halt
offensive ads.

The incidents added to a growing awareness of the complicated and powerful

automated advertising systems that have turned Facebook and Google into two of
the worlds most valuable companies. The companies have learned how to maximize
their ability to connect any size of advertiser to highly tailored groups of people who
use their services every day, collecting billions of dollars in the process.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/business/facebook-advertising-anti-semitism.html?action=click&contentCollection=Technology&module=Related 1/4
9/22/2017 Google and Facebook Face Criticism for Ads Targeting Racist Sentiments - The New York Times

But the potential misuse of those tools has become a national concern in the past
year, particularly after Facebook disclosed last week that fake accounts based in
Russia had purchased more than $100,000 worth of ads on divisive issues in the
lead-up to the presidential election.

Its shocking because its illustrating the degree of targeting thats possible,
said Eli Pariser, the author of The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is
Changing What We Read and How We Think. But I think the critical piece of
context is this is happening when we know that a foreign country used targeted
Facebook ads to influence opinion around an election.

He added: Before all of this, you could see the rise of targeted advertising, you
could see the rise of social politics, but the conjunction of the two in this way feels
new.

Facebooks self-service ad-buying platform allowed advertisers to direct ads to

the news feeds of about 2,300 people who said they were interested in anti-Semitic
subjects, according to the article by ProPublica. Facebooks algorithms automatically
generated the categories from users profiles.

Reporters from ProPublica tested Facebook advertising categories to see

whether they could buy ads aimed at people who expressed interest in topics like
Jew hater, How to burn jews, and History of why jews ruin the world. The
reporters paid $30 to promote ProPublica posts to the people affiliated with the anti-
Semitic categories to ensure they were real options, according to the investigation,
which noted that Facebook had approved the posts within 15 minutes.

Facebook said in a statement that users had entered the terms under the
employer or education fields on their profiles. Doing so violated the companys
policies, the company said, and led to their appearance on the ad-buying tool.

The company said it would remove targeting by such self-reported fields until
we have the right processes in place to help prevent this issue. It added that hate
speech and discriminatory advertising have no place on our platform.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/business/facebook-advertising-anti-semitism.html?action=click&contentCollection=Technology&module=Related 2/4
9/22/2017 Google and Facebook Face Criticism for Ads Targeting Racist Sentiments - The New York Times

After the ProPublica report, BuzzFeed conducted a similar test on Google, where
ads are purchased based on potential search terms. The site reported that upon
entering terms like why do Jews ruin everything and white people ruin, the
automated system suggested long lists of offensive keyword ideas like black
people ruin neighborhoods and Jewish parasites. It then allowed the purchase of
some of the terms for ads.

Google said that it informed advertisers when their ads were offensive and
rejected, and that not all suggested keywords were eligible for purchase.

In this instance, ads didnt run against the vast majority of these keywords, but
we didnt catch all these offensive suggestions, Sridhar Ramaswamy, Googles
senior vice president of ads, said in a statement. Thats not good enough, and were
not making excuses. Weve already turned off these suggestions, and any ads that
made it through, and will work harder to stop this from happening again.

The Daily Beast noted on Friday that Twitter was also allowing people to target
ads based on some racial slurs. But the greater scrutiny is on Facebook and Google,
given their sheer size and dominance of the online advertising business, which
brings each company tens of billions of dollars in revenue a year.

Last week, Facebook representatives briefed the Senate and House Intelligence
Committees, which are investigating Russian intervention in the election, about ads
on the site. The company told congressional investigators that it had identified more
than $100,000 worth of ads on hot-button issues that were traced back to a Russian
company with links to the Kremlin.

The ads about 3,000 of them focused on divisive topics like gay rights, gun
control, race and immigration, and they were linked to 470 fake accounts and pages
that Facebook subsequently took down, according to its chief security officer.
Facebook has not released copies of the ads to the public.

Last fall, Facebook came under fire after ProPublica reported that advertisers
could use its targeting to exclude certain races, or what the social network called
ethnic affinities, from housing and employment ads, a potential violation of the
Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Facebook, which assigns

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/business/facebook-advertising-anti-semitism.html?action=click&contentCollection=Technology&module=Related 3/4
9/22/2017 Google and Facebook Face Criticism for Ads Targeting Racist Sentiments - The New York Times

the updated term multicultural affinity to certain users based on their interests and
activities on the site, no longer allows it to be used in ads for housing, employment
or credit.

These series of problems with advertising make the company look unprepared
to handle the power of its ad system, said Benjamin Edelman, an associate professor
at Harvard Business School.

Theyve created a very complicated ad platform it has all kinds of options

and doodads and things working automatically and manually, and they dont know
what they built, Professor Edelman said. The machine has a mind of its own.

Mr. Pariser said the types of targeting reported this week made a strong
argument for increased disclosure of the funding behind political ads online,
especially on Facebook. The Federal Election Commission voted on Thursday to seek
public comment on disclosure requirements around online political ads, which
advocates hope will lead to rules requiring more disclaimers revealing who paid for
online content.

This is drawing a new level of public awareness to how targeted advertising can
be used to manipulate and affect politics and political conversation in ways that
didnt used to be feasible at all or easy, Mr. Pariser said.

Follow Sapna Maheshwari on Twitter @sapna and Alexandra Stevenson @jotted.

A version of this article appears in print on September 16, 2017, on Page B1 of the New York edition with
the headline: Major Sites Face Rebuke For Ads Tied To Racism.

2017 The New York Times Company

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/business/facebook-advertising-anti-semitism.html?action=click&contentCollection=Technology&module=Related 4/4