Facebook ‘serves ads on white supremacy group searches’

News in brief

Despite purporting to ban hate groups from using its platform, Facebook is still making advertising money from searches for white supremacy groups that have maintained a presence, according to a report from non-profit watchdog the Tech Transparency Project (TTP).

In TTP’s investigation, Facebook served ads on 40% of the researcher’s searches for white supremacist groups, including from major corporations like Walmart, non-profit the Coast Guard Foundation, and culture magazine Rolling Stone.

TTP also found that searches for groups with “Klu Klux Klan” in their name yielded ads for black churches.

A spokesperson for Meta stated: “All 270 groups that Meta has designated as white supremacist organizations are banned from our platform. We invest extensively in technology, people, and research to keep our platforms safe. We immediately resolved an issue where ads were appearing even if a user searched for terms related to banned organizations and we are also working to fix an auto generation issue, which incorrectly impacted a small number of pages.

“We will continue to work with outside experts and organizations in an effort to stay ahead of violent, hateful, and terrorism-related content and remove such content from our platforms.”