Facebook is making changes to how advertisers can target consumers based on potentially sensitive characteristics, updates that could also affect some benevolent groups that often use personal details like religious and political affinities to generate support for their causes.

The social media giant announced it will also soon allow Facebook users to opt out of receiving ads in sensitive areas like gambling and weight loss if people decide they do not want to be bombarded with messages with those themes.

Facebook has long had a difficult time drawing the line between the positive side of ad targeting, like allowing charitable causes to find sympathetic supporters, versus bad actors who sometimes use those sensitive attributes to discriminate in advertising.

Today's announcement outlining new limits to how advertisers can use personal traits to target users on Facebook came in a blog post from Facebook’s Graham Mudd, VP of ads product marketing. “We want to better match people’s evolving expectations of how advertisers may reach them on our platform and address feedback from civil rights experts, policymakers and other stakeholders,” Mudd said in the announcement, “on the importance of preventing advertisers from abusing the targeting options we make available.”

The plans cover Facebook's ad manager platform, which serves ads to Facebook and Instagram and has other third-party ad placement opportunities depending on how a buyer sets its campaigns.

Starting on Jan. 19 certain “detailed targeting” will be removed from the ad manager platform, “options that relate to topics people may perceive as sensitive, such as options referencing causes, organizations, or public figures that relate to health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, or sexual orientation,” Mudd said.

What it means for Facebook advertisers and users

“On one hand these are clearly hot button subjects and Facebook wants to steer clear of the perception that they are pouring fuel on the fire in the court of public opinion,” said Matt Barash, an ad tech veteran and advisor. “But the vast majority of targeting in these areas is done under the best of intentions and [this] will harm those who need the reach and efficiency of Facebook's ad machine most.”

The newly-named Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has been dealing with negative sentiment around how its ad platform can sometimes make users feel worse about their self-esteem, especially younger teenage users. There have been anecdotes about people dealing with stressful situations made more stressful by intrusive ads that remind them of sore subjects. Facebook has developed policies in the past that allow parents to avoid parenting ads, or pet owners to avoid ads about pets, especially if a person recently lost a beloved pet.

On Tuesday, Facebook announced it will include the option to avoid ads related to “gambling and weight loss, among others.”

Facebook noted that users' interests were never collected for ad targeting based on people’s personal attributes and characteristics, but advertisers could often infer the attributes based on the type of accounts users followed and content they preferred. Facebook has been able to create groups of consumers with shared affinities that often relate to sensitive subjects like their health status and race.

In the past, Facebook’s ad targeting platform was criticized for enabling abusive advertisers to tailor discriminatory ad campaigns related to topics like finance, employment and housing. Unscrupulous advertisers could set targeting parameters that avoid showing ads to protected groups, such as differently abled people or people of certain genders and ethnicities.

For years, Facebook has been working with civil rights groups and governmental organizations to ensure that digital advertising adheres to the same standards as traditional advertising, where discrimination has long been outlawed and regulated. “We’ve heard concerns from experts that targeting options like these could be used in ways that lead to negative experiences for people in underrepresented groups,” Mudd said in the announcement. We routinely review, update and remove targeting options to simplify our ads system, provide more value for advertisers and people, and reduce the potential for abuse.”

On the other side, there are charitable organizations, non-governmental groups and nonprofits that rely on Facebook targeting to recruit members and drive donations.

“The decision to remove these ‘Detailed Targeting’ options was not easy and we know this change may negatively impact some businesses and organizations,” Mudd said.