Facebook announced Friday, that it is launching a new way to detect violent, graphic, sexual, controversial and offensive content across all Pages and Groups on its site and remove ads that appear alongside such content.
In a new process of reviewing all Pages and Groups across the Facebook site, the world's largest online social networking service will be taking aggressive measures to prevent marketers' ads from appearing alongside controversial and offensive content. The latest review-and-removal process will be initiated Monday, which will determine and enlist the Pages and Groups that will receive the "ad-restricted" label. Facebook will remove any offensive, controversial content from highlighted Pages and Groups by the end of next week.
Several women's rights activist groups including Women, Action and the Media, and the Everyday Sexism Project objected to Facebook pages that displayed violent content against women, which resulted in the withdrawal of business from major brands like Nissan and Unilever's Dove.
Advertisements are a serious source of revenue for Facebook. In 2012, 84 percent of the company's total revenue was from advertisements. Hence, Facebook's rigorous action to remove offensive and controversial content does not come as a surprise.
Facebook plans to carry out this process manually at first, but hopes to build a more reliable and automated process to prevent and/or remove ads appearing alongside controversial content.
"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," the company said in a statement posted on its site. "While these changes won't have a meaningful impact on Facebook's business, they will result in benefits to people and marketers."
Facebook is not the only company taking action against the controversial content on its site, Google also made some recent changes to get rid of adult-themed blogs from its Blogger platform that feature sexual content.