Nearly 2,300 people expressed interest in topics like “how to burn Jews.”
Dado Ruvic/Reuters
Until this week, Facebook offered several anti-Semitic advertising categories, allowing advertisers to reach the nearly 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of “Jew hater,” “How to burn Jews,” or, “History of ‘why Jews ruin the world,’” ProPublica reported Thursday. Facebook removed the categories after reporters made the company aware of their existence. “There are times where content is surfaced on our platform that violates our standards,” said Rob Leathern, product management director at Facebook. “In this case, we’ve removed the associated targeting fields in question. We know we have more work to do, so we’re also building new guardrails in our product and review processes to prevent other issues like this from happening in the future.” Last week the social media company disclosed that it had discovered $100,000 worth of advertisement on its site during the 2016 presidential election had been placed by “inauthentic” Russian accounts.
