No more ads on controversial Pages and Groups, announces Facebook

Facebook is going to roll out a revised policy for Pages and Groups to appease advertisers on the website. The new changes will see advertisements running across only brand-appropriate content on the website.

Staring Monday, Facebook will implement this new review process; it will let Facebook determine which Pages and Groups should feature ads along their content. By the end of the week, Facebook will be removing ads from all Pages and Groups that will fall in the expansive ad-restricted list that it will be creating.

According to a report by BBC, this decision comes after complaints by BSkyB and retail chain Marks and Spencer. The companies had threatened to suspend advertising and sponsored stories that appeared alongside “offensive” material. One of the ads was of a a Sky advertisement promoting an M&S voucher that appeared on a page called “cute and gay boys”, which featured images of teenage boys.

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No more ads on controversial pages

“We know that marketers work hard to promote their brands, and we take their objectives seriously. While we already have rigorous review and removal policies for content against our terms, we recognize we need to do more to prevent situations where ads are displayed alongside controversial Pages and Groups. So we are taking action,” wrote Facebook in a post announcing changes to the Review Policy.

The process is going to be manual at first, but will be more scalable and automated in the coming weeks in order to be able to prevent and remove ads appearing next to controversial content. Earlier, a Page selling adult products was eligible to have ads appear on the right-hand side of it, but now Facebook will restrict any ads from appearing next to Pages and Groups that contain any violent, graphic or sexual content.

Another reason behind Facebook taking stringent measures to curb ads appearing besides objectionable content could be the petition against such pages that was posted by the Everyday Sexism Project. Activists had urged Facebook to stop pages that glorified violence against women and had even enlisted help from Facebook advertisers.

Nissan and a dozen other smaller companies had proclaimed that they would stop advertising with Facebook, which was cause enough for the social networking giant to worry. Facebook announced that it would be updating its policies on controversial, harmful and hateful speech on the site and would make creators more accountable for their content. The advertising curb seems to be an appendage to its policies and is bound to make advertisers a little less worried about their brand image.