On January 20th, we woke up to a notification that our Facebook ads will no longer be shown to African Americans. (And neither will yours). Check out the screenshots below:
We snagged this screenshot before they removed the African American targeting options from our ads.
And in this later screenshot (from a different ad) the African American targeting options no longer appear in the Audience profile.
After some digging, we realized this was in the works for a while.
It started in 2018 when Facebook received “feedback” (from who?) that people were unfairly excluding certain races and ethnicities. So Facebook decided to remove race and ethnicity (along with other categories) from exclusion targeting. Here’s a snippet from their April 24, 2018 article to developers:
Then Facebook decided to go even further and stop people from advertising to African Americans (and other communities). Here’s a blurb from their August 11, 2020 blog warning of the upcoming restrictions:
And here’s the final notification they made in late 2021 to both developers and businesses prior to the January 19th restrictions. Here, they finally mention that the feedback came from “civil rights experts” and “stakeholders”:
Going Forward
There’s a great article from Hootsuite on how to make the Facebook Algorithm work for you in 2022. More importantly, this should be a wakeup call to not rely totally on social media for your marketing.
Thankfully, The Community Connection has 40+ methods you can use to market your product and service. We’d like you to grab it by registering as a Vendor with us. Or, if you want to promote other people’s products, register as an Affiliate and we’ll email it right over.
Be encouraged. Together, we will reach our community!