According to the research, Facebook advertised on searches for white nationalist organizations
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| Facebook advertised on searches for white nationalist organizations |
According to research by the Tech Transparency Project, Facebook served ads on searches relating to white supremacist organizations despite a prohibition on such content on the network.
The Washington Post was the first outlet to reveal the findings, which listed 20 Facebook groups and 119 Facebook pages connected to white nationalist organizations. Using resources like the Southern Poverty Law Center, Anti-Defamation League, and even Facebook itself, researchers examined Facebook for 226 classified hate groups or hazardous organizations and discovered that more than a third of them had a presence there.
Despite Facebook's claims that it doesn't make money from hate speech, the survey discovered that 40 percent of the queries included advertising.
Two dozen of the white nationalist pages that were automatically generated by Facebook are among those that the report names. When users list interests, workplaces, or enterprises that don't already have pages, the platform automatically produces those pages for them. A 2020 analysis, also by the Tech Transparency Project, first brought up the problem of automatically produced white supremacist business pages. The 2022 report lists the white supremacist gang "Pen1 Death Squad" as one of the auto-generated pages it found.
In order to keep platforms secure, Meta, according to spokesman Dani Lever, bans 270 groups it has identified as white supremacist organizations from Facebook and invests in employees, technology, and research.
In addition to working to rectify an auto-generation problem that mistakenly affected a limited number of sites, Lever writes, "We promptly resolved an issue where advertising was appearing in searches for phrases related to prohibited groups." In an effort to stay ahead of violent, bigoted, and terrorism-related content and remove it from our platforms, we will keep collaborating with other experts and groups.
Over a thousand advertisers abandoned Facebook in 2020 because of the way the social media site handled hate speech and disinformation. The company's policies led to "severe setbacks" for civil rights, according to a report published the same year by civil rights auditors. After the audit, Meta established a civil rights team in 2021, and they have since made public the progress of the recommendations and activities made by the auditors.
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