Facebook has been hard at work building more targeted advertising, specific to individual users, the better not to expose us to things we don't want. And, using the extensive data it not only harvests but which members blithely reveal, advertisers can have a very good idea who their audience is and what they don't know they want -- yet.
But for all the careful pattern-matching the human element is sometimes sadly lacking. Many Facebook users get ads telling them that they are fat, sad, or bald -- perhaps all true, but did I come here to be insulted?
When Facebook decided that Washington Post reporter Rachel Beckman was too fat, she decided to do what reporters do and take a little look into how the sausage is made.
Beckman went through Facebook’s complaint process and learned that this form of advertising often gets through despite specific guidelines to prevent it. In the list of “Common Ad Mistakes” for Facebook advertisers was the following:
Last month Facebook augmented its ad guidelines, in part to reduce the site’s inadvertent contributions to the growing numbers of users with bad body images, and placed a rating feature on certain ads.
But as Facebook gets into more explicit targeting, the chances users will be offended can only increase. And while new iterations of Facebook's social advertising bypass ad copy to bring friend endorsements directly to friends, the algorithms used to match ads to users will have to be increasingly sensitive to avoid user revolt.
Beckman stopped getting the diet ads eventually. But that's not the end of the story. After getting married in May, she started getting this ad:
Could be her mother-in-law placed the ad, but we doubt it.
Photo: Flickr/merci
