Facebook’s Ad-Targeting Problem, Captured in a Literal Shade of Gray
“I have great empathy around the difficulty.”
He acknowledged situations in which certain targeting categories could be used “in malicious ways”
but said, “This type of behavior is against our policies and has no place on our platform.”
While its system is far from perfect — the company recently disclosed
that it allowed Russian operatives using fake accounts and pages to place ads on topics that polarized American voters, like race and immigration — the company said it would block an ad that included overtly racist content or directed users to a web page promoting racist ideas.
“What we’re actually talking about is all of the social issues one can think of — any social issue, social debate, social strife — being reproduced in this
arena,” said Sarah T. Roberts, an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies content moderation on digital platforms.
One of the pages, with roughly 250,000 likes, recently included a post declaring the Confederate Army “the greatest force
that ever walked the Earth,” and another post prominently featuring a quote attributed to a Confederate general: “The Army of Northern Virginia was never defeated.
It merely wore itself out whipping the enemy.”
Stephanie McCurry, a Civil War historian at Columbia University, examined both pages and found them littered with “fake history,” such as the suggestion
that slavery was not the central reason for secession.
Those who may be targeted in an ad campaign around the Confederate States may be Civil War buffs
who visited or liked a page about the Confederacy set up by a seller of history books.
