Top Facebook Exec Sheryl Sandberg Just Apologized for Racist Ad Targeting

She was “disgusted and disappointed.”

ay Nietfeld/DPA/ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, said Wednesday that last week’s revelations that terms such as “Jew Hater” or “how to burn Jews” could be used as targeting criteria for advertising on the site made her “disgusted and disappointed,” and that the social media titan would make some changes to prevent it from happening again. 

“Hate has no place on Facebook — and as a Jew, as a mother, and as a human being, I know the damage that can come from hate,” Sandberg wrote in a statement posted to her Facebook page. The fact that hateful terms were even offered as options was totally inappropriate and a fail on our part. We removed them and when that was not totally effective, we disabled that targeting section in our ad systems.” 

Sandberg’s statement comes in the wake of a ProPublica report revealing that a variety of anti-Semitic categories could be used as targeting terms by people paying for advertising on the website. The advertising system allowed for ad buyers to target Facebook users based on entries in categories such as education and employer. “People wrote those deeply offensive terms into the education and employer write-in fields and because these terms were used so infrequently, we did not discover this until ProPublica brought to our attention. We never intended or anticipated this functionality being used this way—and that is on us. And we did not find it ourselves—and that is also on us,” Sandberg said. 

The story came shortly after the company announced that it had found evidence that more than $100,000 in political advertising was bought and paid for by about 470 “inauthentic” affiliated Russian accounts during the 2016 presidential campaign. That announcement prompted members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election to tell reporters that Facebook would likely be called in front of the committee to answer questions about its role in the Russian operation. Legislators in both the Senate and the House have accused Facebook of withholding information relevant to the Russia investigation.

The double-whammy has some demanding increased regulation of not only Facebook advertising, but the way online advertising works in general.

Sandberg said Wednesday that targeted advertising on Facebook has “helped millions of businesses grow, find customers, and hire people,” and that the system has been most beneficial for small businesses “who can use tools that previously were only available to advertisers with large budgets or sophisticated marketing teams.”

Facebook will tighten its advertising policy enforcement, increase its human review of some automated ad processes, and work to develop an easier method for people to report such issues to Facebook, Sandberg said. 

“We hope these changes will prevent abuses like this going forward,” she said. “Our community deserves to have us enforce this policy with deep caution and care.”

Read the full statement here:

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate