Facebook works on a system to keep ads away from certain topics such as crime, politics etc.
This will give advertisers more freedom on how to expose their ads, and not associate them with topics that are counterproductive to their advertising.
A few days ago, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned the goals they had planned for Facebook during 2021. According to him, we will see less political content in the News Feed in the future and focus on features that help build communities.
As Facebook implements new measures, we will see a series of changes during 2021. For exmaple we will be able to remove recommendations from political and civic groups. On the other hand, the social media giant is also working on other solutions for advertisers. For example, Zuckerberg mentioned that they will implement a system that will give more freedom to advertisers to determine which topics they want to keep away from the ads that appear in the News Feed.
The Facebook team eplained: “For example, a children’s toy company may want to avoid content related to a new crime show, so it could select the “Crime and Tragedy” theme.”
This way, advertisers could exclude topics that might detract from the ethos they’re trying to achieve with their ads to capture users’ attention. It seems like a logical dynamic, both for advertisers and users. However, these topic exclusion controls in the News Feed are not so easy to implement, and Facebook assures that it will work to protect users’ privacy during the development of these changes.
For the moment, this new dynamic will be implemented with a small group of users as a pilot test, but this stage could take all of 2021.