Facebook bans ads targeting race, sexual orientation and religion

Facebook and Instagram are to stop allowing advertisers to target users based on their history of posting, reading or liking content related to subjects such as sexual orientation, religion and political beliefs.

This means, for example, that advertisers can no longer pay to target people who have shown an interest in same-sex marriage or Catholicism.

Meta generates 98% of its income from advertisers, who are able to target specific demographics and consumers because the company has built up profiles of its users through their online activity. Meta, which also sells adverts on its Messenger app and to third-party apps through its audience network, made $86bn (?64bn) in revenues last year. Nearly 2 billion people use the Facebook app every day.

Meta acknowledged that the move could affect political groups and campaigning organisations, many of which use Facebook for fundraising.

However, advertisers on Meta platforms can continue to target billions of users based on a range of options such as age, gender, occupation and location. Meta is under scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic over its record on keeping users safe following revelations by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has released tens of thousands of internal company documents.

In a quarterly report released on Tuesday, Meta said the prevalence of hate speech on Facebook had fallen for the fourth quarter in a row. In the third quarter of 2021, it was 0.03% or 3 views of hate speech per 10,000 views of content, down from 0.05% in the second quarter.