By Joel Jones, Vice President, GMS Operations
Last month, The New York Times brought to our attention nine ads from over the past year that they believe demonstrate an uneven application of our ads policies. They raised the possibility that innocuous ads featuring women were wrongfully categorized as “adult content” and rejected, while genuinely provocative ads featuring men were allowed.
Most of the examples flagged by the Times were correctly accepted or rejected based on our policies. We did, however, mistakenly take down a picture of a woman reading and a picture of a woman’s bare back, and mistakenly approved an image of a man’s abdomen.
Similar to our Community Standards that govern posts shared organically, we have Ad Policies that outline the kinds of ads allowed on Facebook. But unlike organic posts from friends or Pages, ads are proactively pushed out to people, so we have an even higher standard for what is allowed. This means not only prohibiting clearly inappropriate content — like hate speech, pornography, or illegal drugs — but also limiting ads that people may find offensive. Because different people find different things offensive, we take a more conservative approach. We think it’s more important to maintain a respectful platform than to collect ad dollars.
In line with this policy, we do not allow ads that are sexually suggestive — regardless of whether they feature men or women. We don’t allow ads that contain “nudity, depictions of people in explicit or suggestive positions, or activities that are overly suggestive or sexually provocative.” This includes implied nudity, excessive skin, or images that focus on individual body parts. The policies are posted publicly for anyone to read.
When an ad is submitted, it goes through an extensive review process before it is approved and can run on the platform. Through a combination of automation and human review, we assess whether any part of the ad contains content that violates our ad policies, including adult content. We do typically see more attempts to advertise using images of women in suggestive poses, as opposed to men. For example, a sampling over the last 30 days shows that ads with women are created almost twice as often as ones with men. However our enforcement does not distinguish between men and women. And the examples used to train reviewers feature both sexes.
We review millions of ads each week — and offer appeals to advertisers and encourage our community to report ads to us that they think shouldn’t be on Facebook.
We recently announced that we will be adding an additional 10,000 people to the team that enforces our Community Standards and reviews ads and are focused on improving our review protocols and automated systems.
At the end of the day, we want our advertisers to succeed. When we create the best experience for people, it’s ultimately best for the advertisers as well.
We want to thank the New York Times for bringing these examples to our attention, and we welcome continued feedback as we work to ensure that our ads policies are applied fairly and consistently.