Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Facebook Allowed Ads To Target Users Who Liked ‘How To Burn Jews’

Facebook allowed users to buy ad space targeting people who had expressed interest in anti-Semitic topics like “Jew hater” and “How to burn jews,” the news organization ProPublica reported Thursday.

ProPublica used Facebook to buy $30 worth of ads targeting those groups. Those ads were approved within 15 minutes, the report claimed.

Facebook allows advertisers to target users who express interest in tens of thousands of categories. The “Jew hater” category only had 2,274 people associated with it (not enough to buy an ad), so Facebook system’s reportedly recommended adding “Second Amendment” as an additional category—“presumably because its system had correlated gun enthusiasts with anti-Semites,” the report explained.

The ads eventually reached 5,897 people, generating 101 clicks and 13 “engagements” (like a “like” or a comment).

After the reporters contacted Facebook, most of the questionable categories were deleted.

“There are times where content is surfaced on our platform that violates our standards,” Facebook product management director Rob Leathern told ProPublica. “In this case, we’ve removed the associated targeting fields in question. We know we have more work to do, so we’re also building new guardrails in our product and review processes to prevent other issues like this from happening in the future.”

Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.