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Satan Worshippers Drive Advertisers Out of Facebook

by Terrence O'Brien on August 6, 2007 at 04:11 PM

Advertisers Pull Out of Facebook Over Questionable Content
It seems a number of U.K.-based advertisers have taken issue with the content displayed alongside their advertisements on Facebook. First Direct, Vodafone, Virgin Media, Halifax and the Prudential have withdrawn their ads on the social networking site when it was revealed that their advertisements were being displayed on the Facebook page of the extremist, far-right British National Party.

Facebook has no filtering system in place, and implementing one seems like it would be a rather problematic undertaking. One would expect that it would be understood that when purchasing advertising space on a site as large as Facebook, there is a good chance your ads would appear next to questionable content.

The Register points out that ads for the Vodafone rival Orange appear on the Facebook page of the Aryan Satan Worshipers, but that no sane person would logically deduce that Orange supports white power or Satan.

The question is whether this is just the beginning. Other large social sites such as MySpace are vulnerable to the same complaints as Facebook. Is it only a matter of time before they are forced to provide some sort of filtering system for keeping advertisers content off of pages they wish not to be associated with?

Most of us aren't interested in Satan-worshipping Facebook members, but will this lead to the inevitable censorship that we see on other advertiser-supported media such as TV?

From Tech Crunch

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Tags: ads, advertisers, facebook, myspace

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