Facebook allowed advertisers to target users interested in pseudoscience
The Markup found that Facebook's ad-targeting system was allowing advertisers to reach users classified as interested in 'pseudoscience', a category with more than 78 million people. The Markup paid to run an ad targeting that category and Facebook approved it, despite promising to take down COVID-19 misinformation. After being contacted by The Markup, Facebook removed the interest category.
- Date it happened
- 2020-04-20
- Organisation involved
- Product, system or model
- Facebook Ads Manager
This incident was imported from themarkup.org. Our additions to it — the structured fields, the translation, the checks against other reports — are published under the same licence.
This is a record of what was reported, not a finding that anyone broke the law. If it names your organisation and you believe it is wrong, the corrections process is free and open to everyone.