Facebook pulls politics, health and religion from ad guidance standards

The Facebook application announced its intention to stop soon the advertising campaigns for its users and the Instagram service of the parent company based on their interests in some sensitive topics, such as gender or political affiliation; This is a significant change for the giant group in the field of electronic advertising.

"We want to better respond to people's changing expectations about advertisers' tactics," said Graham Mudd, Facebook's vice president of advertising.

A major crisis afflicts the leading social network, which recently changed the name of its parent company to "Meta", due to leaks of a former Facebook employee accusing it of prioritizing its profits over the safety of its users.

The network generated $84 billion in revenue in 2020, thanks specifically to advertising revenue.

Advertisers accept that their campaigns can be targeted precisely at users; They can choose from thousands of interest categories that categorize people according to the pages they have viewed or the ads they have clicked on.

As of January 19, thousands of categories will be removed, including those related to gender, health problems (chemotherapy or World Diabetes Day), religious practices (Catholic church or religious holidays), political or ethnic affiliations.

This move aims to prevent organizations from abusing these categories, such as encouraging people to do negative or dangerous practices just because they are "gay", cancer patients, or of a particular religion.

In the statement, Graham Mudd explained that Facebook had "difficulty making" this decision, based on the opinions of civil rights experts and lawmakers.

In January, the Transparency Project denounced advertisements for gun casings or flak jackets targeting members of far-right groups on Facebook prior to the riots in Washington.

And US authorities specialized in housing cases launched lawsuits in 2019 against Facebook; She accused him of allowing real estate classified ads that "exclude people of color, families with children, women, or people with disabilities."

"We realize that this may affect some companies and organizations," he said, but he pointed out that other tools could be used, including targeting advertising campaigns to reach people who interacted directly with their brand or based, for example, on the geographical position of users.

OTHER NEWS

Niantic launches Metaverse app creation platform

Niantic has launched a platform to build what it calls "Metaverse" applications in the real world. The company's founder and CEO, John Hanke, said the platform, called Lightship, is built on the parts necessary to connect the digital world and the real world together.

According to Hanke, Lightship allows mobile apps to determine if a user's camera is pointed at the sky or water, map the surface and depth of the environment in real time, or place a virtual object behind a physical object.

Niantic is best known for creating one of the most successful mobile games of all time, Pokémon Go. With the Lightship platform, Hanke says the company is unlocking the storehouse of technology it used to build its products in order to help others build AR applications globally.

Lightship has been in development for some time to serve the company's developers, but starting now, it will be open to any developer. Most of the software toolkit is free, although the company charges for a feature that can allow multiple devices to access shared AR experiences simultaneously.

The company is also committing $20 million to fund new companies building augmented reality applications. The company is planning a major update to its Lightship platform next year, building what it calls a visual positioning system for augmented reality glasses.

With the new system, glasses with screens are able to understand exactly where they are in the real world, and this allows virtual objects to stay in touch with real locations.

This is a critical component of augmented reality glasses, such as the kind Niantic is building in collaboration with Qualcomm.

Hanke, who previously ran Google Maps before Niantic started, says the goal of Lightship is to set a basic pattern for what AR could be.

And while tech giants like Meta and Apple are building similar software tools, Hanke believes that Lightshape's support for iOS and Android makes it more attractive to developers.

Last August, Hanke wrote a blog post describing the idea of ​​Metaverse as a dystopian nightmare, and against the idea of ​​technology pulling people out of the real world.

Contrary to the idea championed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Hanke wants Niantic developers to build AR apps that keep people interacting with physical objects.