Sheryl Sandberg Says Facebook Will Tweak Its Ad Platform To Eliminate Hateful Categories

Justin Tallis / AFP / Getty Images

Facebook is making changes to its ad platform in an attempt to prevent people from using it for hateful ad targeting.

On Wednesday afternoon, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg responded to a ProPublica report published last week that found advertisers could use Facebook to target people interested in topics like “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” and the Nazi Party. In a Facebook post, Sandberg called the targeting criteria totally inappropriate, and said Facebook will make changes to prevent similar issues from taking place again.

“Seeing those words made me disgusted and disappointed – disgusted by these sentiments and disappointed that our systems allowed this,” she said.

Here’s Sandberg’s full post:

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Facebook: sheryl

Before last week's report, whenever someone wrote anything into Facebook's self-reported profile fields — education, employment, job title, and field of study — Facebook's ad system would automatically make that entry a targeting option. So people listing “Jew hater” in their field of study automatically turned “Jew hater” into an ad targeting option. To fix the problem, Facebook is adding human review to the process, hoping it will be a firewall against something like this happening again. ProPublica found the targeting criteria inside Facebook's ad system following a tip. there were 2,274 people in the “Jew hater” category that it discovered.

Facebook is also working on a program “to encourage people on Facebook to report potential abuses of our ads system to us directly,” Sandberg said. The company will also clarify its ad policies and tighten its enforcement of the policies Sandberg said, without providing much more detail.

Sandberg admitted in her post that Facebook was unprepared for such abuse because it hadn't considered it. “We never intended or anticipated this functionality being used this way – and that is on us. And we did not find it ourselves – and that is also on us,” she said.

Facebook's inability to anticipate how less-than-altruistic people might abuse its products has been a long-running problem and has factored into a number of its biggest crises, from its fake news scandal to the shocking level of violence that's aired on Facebook Live. As BuzzFeed News' Mat Honan put it in April, “The problem with connecting everyone on the planet is that a lot of people are assholes.”

Asked if the need to add human reviewers means there's a fundamental flaw with its technology, Facebook directed BuzzFeed News to this line in Sandberg's post: “The fact that hateful terms were even offered as options was totally inappropriate and a fail on our part.”

Quelle: <a href="Sheryl Sandberg Says Facebook Will Tweak Its Ad Platform To Eliminate Hateful Categories“>BuzzFeed

What Is The TBH App?

1. What is TBH?

It’s an app for answering questions about your friends. You’re given a (mostly) positive question, such as, “the person I relate to most,” and then it lists four of your friends who are also on the app. You have to choose which one of them the question applies to most. When one of your friends chooses you as a response to a question, you get notified that a boy or girl (there’s a non binary option, too) chose you as the answer. You don’t see the name of who chose you.

Then you can see which ones your friends (anonymously) chose you for.

2. Can it be used for bullying?

Not really. The questions are all pretty positive (“always has the best manicure”) or flirty (“Relationship goals?”) — and the ones that are slightly negative are barely so, like, “might run off to join the circus.” Unlike Sarahah or YikYak, which let you write anything anonymously, you can only answer questions the app asks.

That said, I’ve been a teen, and devious teen minds’ ability to invent mean things to do to each other should not be underestimated.

3. So this is for the teens?

Definitely.

4. Then why would I, an adult sign up?

Idk, look, it’s just fun. You get to be goofy with your friends, ok?

5. This sounds dumb, why do people like it?

It feels nice to have people say nice things about you! What more obvious and pure human emotion is there? It's currently the #1 free app in the iTunes store! People love it!

6. Who makes it?

A small company called Midnight Labs in Oakland, CA. According to the company representative I spoke with (who requested to remain anonymous because the company is a sort of egalitarian collective without any one person as its face or name), Midnight Labs had spent five years making social apps that were mostly failures, and they were almost out of money. Then this summer, they had a moment of clarity – they wanted to make something that would make people feel good.

7. How did this spread so fast?

It launched at a single high school in Georgia (TBH doesn’t require you to be in school, but they knew it would work best for teens), and after three days, students at 3,000 schools across Georgia and beyond were using TBH.

There’s a built-in incentive for a user to share the app, too. If you answer a certain number of questions in a row, you get timed out (like Candy Crush). If you want to keep going, you can wait an hour or invite more friends.

8. Why does it say it’s only in a few states?

The company says TBH will roll out to more states soon, but they don’t have an exact timeline. Apparently because it blew up so fast (2 million users signed up in the last six weeks), they just don’t have enough server bandwidth and tech support to expand any faster right now.

However, try your luck — I was able to sneak through in NY even though it said NY wasn’t available. Basically, it’s geofenced, but not that effectively.

9. Is it on Android?

Not yet, and they don’t know when it will be.

Quelle: <a href="What Is The TBH App?“>BuzzFeed