Facebook Enabled Advertisers To Reach 'Jew Haters' (propublica.org)

ProPublica is reporting that Facebook "enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of 'Jew hater,' 'How to burn jews,' or, 'History of why jews ruin the world.'" The organization even went so far as to test these ad categories by paying $30 to target those groups with three "promoted posts" -- in which a ProPublica article or post was displayed in their news feeds. Facebook reportedly approved all three ads within 15 minutes. From the report: After we contacted Facebook, it removed the anti-Semitic categories -- which were created by an algorithm rather than by people -- and said it would explore ways to fix the problem, such as limiting the number of categories available or scrutinizing them before they are displayed to buyers. In all likelihood, the ad categories that we spotted were automatically generated because people had listed those anti-Semitic themes on their Facebook profiles as an interest, an employer or a "field of study." Facebook's algorithm automatically transforms people's declared interests into advertising categories. [ProPublica provides a screenshot of their ad buying process on the company's advertising portal.]

"There are times where content is surfaced on our platform that violates our standards," said Rob Leathern, product management director at Facebook. "In this case, we've removed the associated targeting fields in question. We know we have more work to do, so we're also building new guardrails in our product and review processes to prevent other issues like this from happening in the future."

Comments

The money shot

[PopeRatzo]

The devil is in the details:

Last week, acting on a tip, we logged into Facebook’s automated ad system to see if “Jew hater” was really an ad category. We found it, but discovered that the category — with only 2,274 people in it — was too small for Facebook to allow us to buy an ad pegged only to Jew haters.

Facebook’s automated system suggested “Second Amendment” as an additional category that would boost our audience size to 119,000 people, presumably because its system had correlated gun enthusiasts with anti-Semites.

The site shows users how Facebook categorizes them. It doesn’t reveal the data it is buying about their offline lives.
Instead, we chose additional categories that popped up when we typed in “jew h”: “How to burn Jews,” and “History of ‘why jews ruin the world.’” Then we added a category that Facebook suggested when we typed in “Hitler”: a category called “Hitler did nothing wrong.” All were described as “fields of study.”

Re:In other words

[mjwx]

Antisemitism has historically been linked to anti-banker and anti-capitalist sentiments

Except for the largest antisemitic group in history, the Nazis who were decidedly right wing. Or the current crop of anti-semites who are also decidedly right wing (Sorry, but nowhere has HAMAS said they want justice and social harmony for Palestinians, their main goal is simply the destruction of Israel, same with Iran as theocracy centralises power, not distributes wealth. Both Iran and Palestine have capitalist systems firmly in place as the place was a centre of trade for millennia before the US even existed).

Dont confuse people being anti-Jewish with being anti-Bankers. They're quite happy to accept white bankers.

Proper leftists have no issues with Jews, Antisemitism tends to be linked to extremist nationalism, which is firmly on the extreme right.

It's no accident that the enemy of the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four had a Jewish name: Jews were seen as the enemies of socialism (and the Party, like the USSR, still claimed to be socialist in spite of having few traits in common with socialism).

It helps if you read Nineteen Eighty-Four before commenting on it. The society in 1984 (for brevity's sake) still used money (although there were shortages of almost everything). The idea behind IngSoc is that it was neither English, nor Socialist. Pretty sure George Orwell used those exact words in the novel 1984. You see 1984 was a diatribe against Nazi Facism, it centred on the theme of an institutionalised class structure (inner party members -> outer party members -> Proles) with each cast receiving fewer rights than the one above it, institutionalised surveillance and government control as well extreme nationalism and the perpetual war that comes along with it. The use of the Jewish name Goldstein, was just to link it to Nazism and their Antisemitism and the fact that National Socialism has nothing to do with Socialism as we define it.

Orwell left thinly veiled cues of the society he was ripping off in names, for example in Animal Farm, his diatribe against Stalinist Communism he used Trotsky pigs as the farm animal's leaders in reference to Leon Trotsky who was an early Communist party member under Lenin and who Stalin had killed when he took power after Lenins death.