Social media giant Facebook's parent company Meta (FB) has announced it will be removing the ad-targeting filters that use different sensitive topics.
As the company continues to be under immense pressure from all sides due to its ad-targeting fiasco, the move looks like backtracking.
The topics that will be removed from the filtration system are race, health, religious practices, and political and sexual identification.
The company makes its revenue from ads and despite getting accused of continuous misappropriation of its market hold, the company has seldom taken any steps to win the trust back of the users.
For a long time, the platform has been used as a medium for directing racist, sexist and ultra-nationalist ads based on user activity and since 2019, the company has bled billions to settle different lawsuits.
Graham Mudd, the VP of marketing and ads in the company, said, "...We want to better match people's evolving expectations of how advertisers may reach them on our platform and address feedback from civil rights experts, policymakers, and other stakeholders on the importance of preventing advertisers from abusing the targeting options we make available.
"Today, we're announcing a difficult decision that balances these important considerations."
The move is supposed to take effect on January 19, 2022. Mudd added that the company "heard concerns from experts that targeting options like these could be used in ways that lead to negative experiences for people in underrepresented groups."
While the move might cripple the micro-targeting capability the company features, Mudd claims that it will not hurt the advertisers a great deal.
The businesses can still use the location services, lookalike audience, or customer lists from the custom audiences to target their ads. The company is not just stopping there.
It is also implementing a control system which will give the users greater control over what they see.
Mudd added, "Today, people can opt to see fewer ads related to politics, parenting, alcohol, and pets. Early next year, we will be giving people control of more types of ad content, including gambling and weight loss, among others."
