Facebook’s Ad-Targeting Problem, Captured in a Literal Shade of Gray<br />“I have great empathy around the difficulty.”<br />He acknowledged situations in which certain targeting categories could be used “in malicious ways”<br />but said, “This type of behavior is against our policies and has no place on our platform.”<br />While its system is far from perfect — the company recently disclosed<br />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.<br />“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<br />arena,” said Sarah T. Roberts, an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies content moderation on digital platforms.<br />One of the pages, with roughly 250,000 likes, recently included a post declaring the Confederate Army “the greatest force<br />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.<br />It merely wore itself out whipping the enemy.”<br />Stephanie McCurry, a Civil War historian at Columbia University, examined both pages and found them littered with “fake history,” such as the suggestion<br />that slavery was not the central reason for secession.<br />Those who may be targeted in an ad campaign around the Confederate States may be Civil War buffs<br />who visited or liked a page about the Confederacy set up by a seller of history books.
