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Facebook sold adverts targeted to ‘Jew Haters’

Facebook (Getty)
Facebook (Getty)

Facebook has come under fire for allowing advertisers to target ads at people described as interested in the topic, ‘Jew hater’.

The company also allowed adverts to be targeted at groups interested in the topic, ‘How to burn Jews.’

The controversy follows recent revelations that the company discovered sold $100,000 of adverts to Russian groups which aimed to spread divisive and misleading information during last year’s American election.

The categories were found within Facebook’s self-service advertising system – along with a category labelled, ‘History of why Jews ruin the world’.

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The categories were found by journalism organisation ProPublica – which bought adverts to test that they were real, and were able to deliver them to 2,300 people interested in the anti-semitic topics.

Facebook claims that the categories were collected by an algorithm from users’ profiles, and said it had ‘removed the associated targeting fields’.

Rob Leathern, product management director at Facebook, said, ‘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.’