Updates To Housing, Employment and Credit Ads in Ads Manager

Facebook Business

August 26, 2019

Facebook cares deeply about civil rights and we want to make sure we’re advancing them on our platform. As part of a historic settlement with leading civil rights organizations in March we announced changes to help prevent discrimination in ads that offer housing, employment and credit opportunities. After giving advertisers time to familiarize themselves with the changes we started rolling out in June, today we're requiring all advertisers based in the U.S. or trying to reach audiences in the U.S. to use our new process to buy housing, employment and credit ads. These ads are considered Special Ad Categories and have restricted targeting options in Ads Manager. To review these ads, we will use mostly automated review, supported by human reviewers. Mistakes will happen but we continue to improve the more ads we review. As we said in June, we plan to extend enforcement to all other ad-buying systems by the end of the year.

If you are in or want to reach people in the US with ads that offer housing, employment or credit opportunities, you must now select the corresponding Special Ad Category in Ads Manager or your ad will not be able to run. These ads will not allow targeting by age, gender, ZIP code, multicultural affinity, or any detailed options describing or appearing to relate to protected characteristics.

Advertisers using Special Ad Categories will no longer be able to access Lookalike Audiences. Instead, advertisers will be able to create a Special Ad Audience, an audience based on similarities in online behavior without considering things like age, gender or ZIP code. We worked closely with National Fair Housing Alliance, American Civil Liberties Union and the Communication Workers of America on these changes.

Discrimination has no place on Facebook, and our advertising policies have long prohibited unlawful discrimination. To help ensure compliance with that policy, all advertisers must certify and accept our non-discrimination policy, regardless of the type of ads they’re running.

Learn more about how to manage housing, employment and credit ads by visiting our Advertiser Help Center. You can also view our updated policy on Discriminatory Practices.

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