On Facebook, it was possible to target advertising campaigns, narrowing the target audience for anti-Semitic keywords, CBS reported. When buying ads on Facebook, an advertiser can enter anti-Semitic tags that will attract the right category of users, if it is, for example, about organizing an extreme right rally. Some of the offensive Keywords used in the ads were "Jew Haters", "Hitler did nothing wrong", "How to burn jews", etc.

Facebook and Google removed anti-Semitic ads

ProPublica, the New York-based nonprofit organization, was the first which disclosed the truth of anti-semitic ads on Facebook.

The organization contacted the administration of Facebook, after which the company hastened to remove the anti-Semitic tags and make a statement that the company does not tolerate xenophobic statements on its platform.

Online ad sales differ from offline ads. Anyone can easily place ads online, and the giant internet networks and social networks such as Facebook and Google are the open sources for online advertisements, just a few clicks and an advertisement is ready. Facebook alone generates $9.3 billion in revenue in the second quarter, but it is quite difficult for the company to check every online sale with 2 billion users.

According to Techcrunch, on social networks decided to repeat the experiment with Facebook and tried to buy advertising on Google.

It turned out that in the targeted advertisement of the search engine, you can specify the same anti-Semitic categories. However, Google also removed xenophobic tags after the advertisement had been published.

What is the mechanics of running online ads on Facebook?

Facebook ad manager is the open source for customizing and placing ads.

Facebook allows choosing the specific geographic location, for example, a person can run his/her ad throughout Texas but can exclude Austin. We can choose the gender, age, and speakers of the designated languages.

The detailed targeting advertisement options of Facebook are very helpful for many businesses, but it becomes worse when people start publishing the anti-semantic ads such as Jew hater.

Facebook is a place where anyone can target ads with a certain kind of interests like content, behavior, and opinions.

Facebook is not only the platform for targeting such malicious advertisements. Google has similar capabilities to target the ads. Google is now reducing the number of offensive ads by restricting some features for some particular intolerable keywords which can create a dispute in the society. Google said that "Our goal is to prevent our keyword suggestions tool from making offensive suggestions, and to stop any offensive ads appearing."
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