Christian Martinez from Facebook: We Need To Enable Everyone To See the Content That’s Most Relevant To Them

For Christian Martinez¸ Head of Multicultural at Facebook, now, in the digital era, everyone can benefit from accessing content that’s more relevant to them, and this is especially critical for people who choose to affiliate with ethnic communities. “However, the experience of ads constantly reminding you that you’re different from the majority is incredibly marginalizing, and it’s not right” he wrote in Facebook’s newsroom blog. To address this, Martinez explained, online companies such as Facebook, enable advertisers to reach people whose likes and other activity on their websites suggest they’re interested in content relating to particular ethnic communities. And also, allows them to do “exclusion targeting” which prevents audiences for community-specific ads from seeing a generic ad targeted to a large group. This “helps avoid the offensive outcome that traditional advertising can often create for people in the minority.” For Martinez, this kind of communication is positive, because it reflects an advertiser’s respect for the diverse communities it is trying to reach. But he made a difference with “negative exclusion” where advertising purposely excludes a minority, which is against the law. In order for Facebook to be a platform that’s respectful and empowering, and that enables people to see ads and other content that respect the diversity of their global community, Martinez said: “We need to enable everyone to see the content that’s most relevant to them — and work to encourage everyone to embrace, not suppress, the diversity that makes our community great.”