Facebook cuts sex and violence ads

Keeping marketers happy is Facebook's new hobby, which is why plans to axe adverts on pages containing sexual or violent content is no surprise.

Fresh from introducing video for Instagram, the social networking site has put on it's advertising hat, in a bid to keep revenue flowing within the company.

The new review of policy for pages and groups will see Facebook remove adverts from any groups or pages with controversial content.

"Our goal is to both preserve the freedoms of sharing on Facebook but also protect people and brands from certain types of content," Facebook said in a statement.

"We know that marketers work hard to promote their brands, and we take their objectives seriously.

"While we already have rigorous review and removal policies for content against our terms, we recognise we need to do more to prevent situations where ads are displayed alongside controversial Pages and Groups. So we are taking action."

Beginning today, Facebook will implement a new review process for determining which Pages and Groups should feature ads alongside their content.

This process will expand the scope of Pages and Groups that should be ad-restricted. By the end of the week, the site says it will remove ads from all Pages and Groups that fall into this new, more expansive restricted list.

"For example, we will now seek to restrict ads from appearing next to Pages and Groups that contain any violent, graphic or sexual content (content that does not violate our community standards)," Facebook said.

"Prior to this change, a Page selling adult products was eligible to have ads appear on its right-hand side; now there will not be ads displayed next to this type of content."

In order to be thorough, the review process will be manual at first, but in the coming weeks Facebook will build a more scalable, automated way to prevent and/or remove ads appearing next to controversial content.

"All of this will improve detection of what qualifies as questionable content, which means we’ll do a better job making sure advertising messages appear next to brand-appropriate Pages and Groups," the social media company said.

"While these changes won't have a meaningful impact on Facebook's business, they will result in benefits to people and marketers.

"Like any digital platform, we’re not going to be perfect but we will be much better. We’ll continue to work aggressively on this issue with advertisers."

Is this a wise move by Facebook? Tell us your thoughts below