Facebook Reportedly Targeted LGBTQ Users with "Gay Cure" Ads

[RandySF]

According to Attitude from a study from The Telegraph, Facebook has been reportedly targeting LGBTQ users with gay conversion advertisements.

As The Telegraph mentioned, users (including young LGBTQ people) reported seeing ads promoting “sexual purity” and gay conversion therapy. When users inquired about why they were seeing these particular ads, Facebook said they noticed they were interested in “gender issues.”

Apparently, one user, Tessa Ann Schwarz was shown a video titled 'Homosexuality Was My Identity' which promoted conversion therapy because she liked LGBT pages on Facebook.

Facebook has since removed the posts. Facebook's policies for advertisers state that ads must not "engage in predatory advertising practices or contain content that discriminates against, harasses, provokes or disparages people who use Facebook or Instagram."

A Facebook representative told The Telegraph: "We have rejected these ads and they are no longer running on Facebook."


https://www.out.com/news-opinion/2018/8/27/facebook-reportedly-targeted-lgbtq-users-gay-cure-ads?amp&__twitter_impression=true

[Loki Liesmith]

1. This wasn't a nefarious plot

It was just a result of letting bag-of-words algorithms do your thinking for you.

An anti homosexuality ad will have many of the same words as a pro homosexuality ad. The syntax will be different.

Better machine learning will eventually fix this.

[pnwmom]

2. Of course it was -- but not by Facebook. The pushers of this gay-conversion propaganda paid

to have the content viewed by gay people. Gay people and their families were the intended audience.

Better machine learning wouldn't have been enough; there had to be a decision by FB not to accept ads and videos like this.

[Loki Liesmith]

3. No human at Facebook inspects these ads.

They don’t have the personnel for that. Their business model would never scale if they did.

They decompose the videos or their scripts into a set of terms and correlate their topics with a set of other topics. They use automated searches to identify offensive terms. If nothing is explicitly offensive at the individual term level the ad is green lit. Humans only enter the review stream if there is a complaint.

If they had humans reviewing every ad from the ground up their profit margins would collapse. The only fix you will ever see from them will be at the level of improved automation.

[mythology]

5. But if they had a known and enforced policy against dangerous ads, this would have been stopped

either in the first place the group wouldn't have submitted it, or after the first person reported it.

[mythology]

4. Just like we sometimes get ads for Republicans here

The framing that it was Facebook targeting is absurd. You can argue that Facebook should have better restrictions around ads for multiple reasons conversion therapy itself being dangerous, targeting a group with the wrong message again like we get ads for Republicans, being too invasive etc.

But Facebook literally didn't target. The group purchasing the ads did the targeting.

[TheBlackAdder]

6. Buy a star and use UBlock and NoScript. You won't get any ads, unless you grant its display.