PanARMENIAN.Net – One of Facebook’s biggest selling points to advertisers is that you can use the company’s vast data trove to target users based on almost any personal characteristic.

But the wide scope of Facebook’s targeting capabilities was revealed on Thursday, September 14 when ProPublica discovered that you could target people using anti-Semitic phrases, including “Jew hater” and “How to burn jews,” Recode says.

Slate did a quick follow up and found that Facebook also enabled targeting for other hateful groups, like the “Ku-Klux-Klan.”

The way this works is that advertisers using Facebook’s automated ad buying software can target users based on specific information that they’ve added to their profile. Users can enter whatever they went on their profile under categories like field of study, school, job title or company. Facebook’s algorithm then surfaces these labels when ad buyers (or journalists) go looking for them.

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