Facebook to pull advertisements from pages with sex, violence

MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA (BNO NEWS) -- The social networking website Facebook on late Friday announced it will implement major changes to the way it displays advertisements in an attempt to prevent marketers from being associated with sexual or violence-related content.

Facebook, the world's largest social networking website with more than 1.1 billion active users, said the changes will take effect on Monday and restrict advertisements from appearing next to Pages or Groups which contain violent, graphic or sexual content that does not violate its community standards.

"We know that marketers work hard to promote their brands, and we take their objectives seriously," Facebook said in a statement. "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."

Currently, a Page selling adult products is eligible to have advertisements appear on its right-hand side, but the new changes will no longer allow this. The social networking website, which gets 85 percent of its revenue from advertisements, said advertisements will be removed from 'controversial' pages within a week.

"In order to be thorough, the review process will be manual at first, but in the coming weeks we will build a more scalable, automated way to prevent and/or remove ads appearing next to controversial content," the statement said. "All of this will improve detection of what qualifies as questionable content, which means we'll do a better job making sure advertising messages appear next to brand-appropriate Pages and Groups."

Facebook said the changes are not expected to have a "meaningful impact" on its business, but it is unknown how much of its revenue is currently being generated by pages that contain violent or sexual content. "We'll continue to work aggressively on this issue with advertisers," it said.

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