Facebook doesn’t want to show you hate speech ads
Following the news that some completely unspeakable phrases are valid “interests” to target with ads on the Facebook Ad platform, there has been a lot of speculation that Facebook put these interests in the list of valid targets intentionally, making the calculation that revenue from anti-semites would add some great value to the company. I am going to show you why that is almost certainly not how Facebook thinks about their ad content policy.
There is one thing this argument gets right, though. Facebook is out to make money, maximize profit, increase revenue, create shareholder value, etc. Trying to guess at the motivations of a massive publicly-traded company is foolish. The motivation is money every time. But in this case, Facebook, like any company with enough cash in the bank for this luxury, is thinking about revenue beyond this quarterly earnings report.
One thing you will notice here (as the author of the infographic was clearly trying to highlight) is that Facebook is the least diversified of the “Big Five” tech companies in terms of revenue. And that source of revenue is Facebook Ads.
In this light, the greatest threat to Facebook right now is that their users will stop using their ads. And if you look at the history of advertising from newspapers to radio to television, you see that advertising channels, no matter how big, never live forever.
So Facebook’s biggest existential risk is that people stop clicking Facebook ads, or worse install an ad blocker, causing fewer companies to buy ads, causing Facebook to lose all their revenue. How do they deal with that?
Well, take a look at all the various internet marketer forums over the past few months and see that self-identified “black hat” internet marketers, and even everyday run of the mill internet marketers are now finding themselves banned for running ads that Facebook never objected to before. Facebook is shifting the focus to ad quality and ad experience. They want to make sure that when you’re on Facebook, you’re not likely to churn because you are sick of the ads, or because you find them offensive (and there’s no question any decent human being would find the words in the original article offensive.)
So how does Facebook measure ad quality? Here’s one way,
and I’m sure there are others. Certainly in the other direction, a conversion (an ad click resulting in a purchase) is a positive signal.
So if Facebook is trying to squeeze every dollar out of you, then at least they are trying to squeeze it out over your entire lifespan. Which makes it very unlikely they would try to put racist ads in your feed, even if it did get them a few dollars. There are so many advertisers willing to fill the demand for ads in the marketplace, but every engaged user has value. They don’t want to lose users, especially as they create more ways to monetize them, and clearly they are willing to burn advertisers to make sure that doesn’t happen.
So what happened then? How did this disgusting phrase get added to the list of millions (tens of millions, hundreds of millions?) of valid interest-based targets?
I definitely couldn’t say. But, one saying comes to mind — “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” — or in this case, an imperfect content filtering algorithm.
