Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has revealed plans to start testing new tools designed to give advertisers control over where their ads are shown on its platforms, Facebook and Instagram feed.
The company made this revelation through a blog post on Thursday, stating that the new tool will permit companies to prevent their ads from being placed next to inappropriate content such as posts about politics, tragedy, or violence.
According to the post, the company will begin testing the new content controls in the second half of this year as it plans to officially roll them out in early 2023.
The company also says it will primarily focus on English-speaking markets for the testing phase. Over the next year, Meta will expand the controls to include ads placed within stories, video feeds, Instagram’s explore page and more.
Meta also plans to someday expand the controls to additional languages.
Announcing, Meta said in the blog post that “Across Meta, we are designing suitability controls to give advertisers control over where their ads are shown”.
“We previously announced our commitment to building content-based suitability controls to address concerns that advertisers have of their ads appearing adjacent to content that is not suitable for their brand preferences. We have been working closely with GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media) as we develop these controls, which will be aligned with the GARM Suitability Framework.”
Meta also announced that it’s partnering with Zefr, a platform that enables companies to measure brand suitability, to monitor and report the context in which ads appear on Facebook. The company will work to verify that ads only appear next to suitable content. Meta and Zefr will begin small-scale testing in the third quarter of this year.
The new tools will be Meta’s response to growing demands from advertisers who have repeatedly asked for more control over their ad placements online to ensure they aren’t displayed next to unfavorable content, a development the company has helped to address in the past.
In November, Meta said it would broaden News Feed controls for advertisers that run ads in English and give them access to “Topic Exclusion Controls.” The three topics are news and politics, social issues, and crime and tragedy. When an advertiser selects one of these topics, their ad will not be shown to people who have recently engaged with these topics. At the time, Meta had said it’s aware that this tool may not address all of the questions that advertisers have and assured to develop content-based controls in the future.
Facebook’s algorithms are notorious for promoting inflammatory content and dangerous misinformation. Given that, Meta is under mounting regulatory pressure to clean up the platform and make its practices more transparent. The modern news cycle and online advertising landscape have made it difficult for brands to avoid having their ads placed next to unsuitable content. Since most companies purchase ads by creating an ad and submitting it to Meta’s ad auction, they don’t influence ad placement, but these forthcoming tools should change that.
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