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Facebook's ad scandal isn't a 'fail,' it's a feature

The trouble is Facebook's business model is structurally identical whether advertisers are selling shoes, politics or fake diet pills

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Facebook logo is seen at a start-up companies gathering at Paris' Station F in Paris, France on January 17, 2017. (Photo: Reuters)

Zeynep Tufekci | NYT
What does it take to advertise on Facebook to people who openly call themselves “Jew haters” and want to know “how to burn Jews”? About $10 and 15 minutes, according to what the investigative nonprofit ProPublica recently uncovered.

After much outcry over this revelation, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, called the anti-Semitic ad targeting “a fail on our part,” promised to put more human reviewers in place, and said the company “never intended or anticipated this functionality being used this way — and that is on us.”

Some of Facebook’s users may find it even harder to accept what

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