Facebook Targeting Changes

Facebook has announced over the past month new policies with regard to specific targeting capabilities for housing, employment, and credit industries advertisers.

The new policies, which come after a year of starting the cleaning up of their third-party partner categories and targeting, focuses on ensuring the platform is non-discriminatory and this is a first step of more changes to come.

Advertisers in this category will be directed to a new, separate platform which will not allow targeting by race, gender, or age groups.

This is a good first step, but more is needed to uncover other areas that might be deemed discriminatory. Some callout the algorithm and the potential to be inadvertently biased by the way it optimizes to certain cohorts based on performance.

It was announced in the Q1 2019 earnings call that Facebook will be reserving roughly 15% of their operating costs (estimated $3-5 Billion) moving forward for contingency around litigating and future regulations. Another rumored change to the platform as Mark Zuckerberg shares his vision for the future is around making Facebook a platform for Privacy and where content is not permanent. We will be watching to see how this rolls out over the next quarter.