Facebook just killed its pseudoscience category for ad targeting

Facebook has removed “pseudoscience” from the list of categories advertisers can use to target people, following an investigation from The Markup. While no longer available as of Wednesday, the social media platform’s ad portal showed more than 78 million Facebook users were interested in pseudoscience, The Markup reports.

“We’ve removed this targeting option to prevent potential abuse in ads,” a Facebook spokesperson confirmed in an email to The Verge.

It’s curious why Facebook had such a category available, even as the company works to combat misinformation about the novel coronavirus pandemic on its platforms. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post on April 16th that Facebook had added warning labels on 40 million posts “related to...

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