Facebook took money from advertiser interested in "Jew haters:" report

Facebook takes money from advertisers who are interested in audiences who are interested in “Jew haters,” “History of ‘why Jews ruin the world” and “how to burn Jews,” a ProPublica investigation revealed.

The journalistic entity on Thursday reported that its reporters paid Facebook $30 to advertise to groups with “promoted posts.” Facebook approved the ads within 15 minutes, ProPublic reported.

Then, the news organization contacted Facebook, which then removed the anti-Semitic categories. Facebook told ProPublica it would explore ways to fix the problem, such as limiting the number of categories available or scrutinizing them before they are displayed to buyers.

Facebook responded directly to that story on Friday, emailing KTVU an update to its advertising policy. "Hate speech and discriminatory advertising have no place on our platform," the statement read. Facebook noted that ProPublica's report "surfaced that these offensive education and employer fields were showing up in our ads ....We immediately removed them." Facebook noted, as did ProPublica, that the number in these ad categories were "extremely small." For now, Facebook said it has removed these "self-reported targeting fields until we have the right processes in place to help prevent this issue." 

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company was founded and is run by Mark Zuckerberg, who is Jewish.

Facebook’s advertising has become a focus of national attention since it disclosed last week that it had discovered $100,000 worth of ads placed during the 2016 presidential election season by “inauthentic” accounts that appeared to be affiliated with Russia.

ProPublica is based in New York and was founded in 2007 as a nonprofit newsroom to produce investigative journalism in the public interest.