Facebook Continued To Identify Users Who Are Interested in Nazis -- and Then Used the Info To Let Advertisers Target Them, Investigation Finds (latimes.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Facebook makes money by charging advertisers to reach just the right audience for their message -- even when that audience is made up of people interested in the perpetrators of the Holocaust or explicitly neo-Nazi music. Despite promises of greater oversight following past advertising scandals, a Times review shows that Facebook has continued to allow advertisers to target hundreds of thousands of users the social media firm believes are curious about topics such as "Joseph Goebbels," "Josef Mengele," "Heinrich Himmler," the neo-nazi punk band Skrewdriver and Benito Mussolini's long-defunct National Fascist Party.

Experts say that this practice runs counter to the company's stated principles and can help fuel radicalization online. "What you're describing, where a clear hateful idea or narrative can be amplified to reach more people, is exactly what they said they don't want to do and what they need to be held accountable for," said Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League's center on extremism. After being contacted by The Times, Facebook said that it would remove many of the audience groupings from its ad platform.

Comments

Sorry

[Shaitan]

I support freedom of speech, even for scum like this.

Re:Sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a freedom of speech issue. Facebook is a privately-run platform, not a government-run platform. Abide by the TOS or get tossed, simple as that.

Re:Sorry

[Shaitan]

Racism is ignorant and irrational, race isn't even an objectively defined thing. Neo-nazi's operate on a blend of false science and outdated and debunked science and promote an idea of exclusion and violence. The people who fall it aren't automatically scum true, people are duped into stupid and irrational ideas all the time even good and intelligent people. There are no shortage of lies and propaganda being spread about neo-nazi's including the idea that they regularly engage in all sorts of hate motivated violence but their platform does still support those ideas and it doesn't just support a pro-white narrative, it supports an anti-everyone else narrative.

I happen to have white skin and if I oppose a measure that unfairly discriminates against me I get associated with all the historical baggage and evils perpetuated by the ideas of groups like Nazi's and the KKK. I should be able to oppose measures that would give a random non-white skin color child an advantage over my own or be proud of my heritage publicly in a fair and logical forum but I can't because these groups are the big ugly strawmen I get lumped in with.

Nobody does more to damage to "white people" than neo-nazi's, Klan, and confederate supporters because every time we try to defend ourselves against another racist policy targeting us we get compared to them. Every time we start a movement, those groups will support it and make it look shameful and dirty.

Re:Sorry

[Shaitan]

Nazi's? Who cares about the Nazi's, I'm talking about people who believe that ideas should be freely expressed and debated without censorship in the light of day. Anyone who believes in free speech. Free speech isn't something we should only support when we like what is being said.

Re: Sorry

[Shaitan]

"Absolutely. "Free Speech". Should apply equally to calls for Jihad, calls for [marginalized/minority group] to be killed, and pumpkin pie recipes."

Yes, it should.

"it's not like any of those things often lead to talk world actions"

Leading to talk isn't a problem. Leading to action also isn't a problem. If you mean violent action the fault lies with the mental instability (potentially with a cause) in the one who commits it not the speaker. Outlawing the speech is akin to outlawing violent video games or movies. I'll invoke Hitler to signal the end of this thread. Hitler wasn't the problem in Nazi germany. The problem in Nazi Germany is that the large class of abused and impoverished citizens who were as a consequence of extreme desperation mentally unstable enough to be receptive to what Hitler had to say. Don't focus on the speaker to solve these issues beyond using your own right to speech to introduce reason and calm. Focus on what makes people listen.

In the case of current events, stop supporting measures that put the poor white majority in the countryside at extreme disadvantage, that cause them further taxation while marginalizing their representation and that racially discriminate against them. There needs to be room for them to disagree with such measures and not automatically be seen as monsters. Without that basic philosophical charity they are left only with bitterness, hate, and disenfranchisement and very little reason not to become what you are calling them anyway.

double-standard

[BringsApples]

a clear hateful idea or narrative can be amplified to reach more people, is exactly what they said they don't want to do

Who determines what a "clear hateful idea" is? Oh, I see what they did there.

HA!

[93 Escort Wagon]

I'm gonna be the first to Godwin this threa... oh crap.

Algorithms sometimes have unintended consequences.

[laxr5rs]

Sometimes articles make it seem like Facebook or someone else went *out of their way* to advertise Nazi stuff to people. That's most probably not the case. They probably made some algorithm do something like. "if X is interested in Y, then send some Z their way." Sometimes that might mean Nazi stuff. Then this happens and people say, "see! FACEBOOK IS SUPPORTING NAZIS." Sorry folks, but sometimes software robotic automatons are not sensitive to everyone's predilections. The simple software robots we are using at this point do not make moral judgements (unless told to) and every possible situation that might crop up that is negative like this one, cannot, I repeat, cannot be accounted for. There's going to be some roadkill if you drive a bunch of cars down the road, and there's going to be some poorly chosen details if you let the amoral algorithmic robots choose for you. That's the breaks. We should be educating the masses that this will happen, but that we will adjust as we can to avoid these kinds of things in the future.

"Academic" is a poor threshold

[drnb]

... "scum" remark wasn't targeted at WW2 academics ...

That's a rather poor description of those attempting to learn and understand history. You don't need to be a university professor conducting research; a young school kid trying to understand history, maybe understand the war their great-grandfather fought in, is acting just as honorably at the university researcher. The history of these terrible events and these terrible people is not some off limits thing that only certain accredited people should be allowed to see. To the contrary, the public at large needs to understand what happened, how it happened, so that it is less likely to happen again.