The social media giant, along with Google, is one of the two largest advertisers on the internet.

Meta, the newly created parent company of Facebook, has announced that it will no longer allow advertisers to target users based on how interested its algorithms think they will be in certain “sensitive” topics such as race, religion, politics, ethnicity, sexual orientation and more.

The social media giant, along with Google’s parent company Alphabet, is one of the two largest advertisers on the internet. Last year, the company made close to 90 percent of its $86 billion in revenue from advertising.

Both Facebook and Google, pride themselves on providing personalised and “highly effective” advertising. They do this by mining a mind-boggling amount of user data across the web and creating advertising profiles of individual users, based on their interests, locations, sexual orientations, and more.

Advertisers can then target a certain kind of audience that they think are most likely to buy their product or services.

However, in the past few years, these targeted advertisements have been increasingly used to spread political messaging and disinformation campaigns.

Facebook has been blamed for inciting riots in the United States, Myanmar, India and many other countries.

"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," Graham Mudd, an executive at Meta, said in a company blog post, yesterday.

Facebook, which recently underwent a brand overhaul as Meta, has been under unprecedented regulatory scrutiny in recent months. A former employee turned whistle-blower, Frances Haugen, released internal company documents to the press, leading to several bombshell revelations about the company’s operations.

Dubbed the “Facebook Files”, these documents revealed that Facebook’s own internal research team reported that its social app Instagram was toxic to teenage girls, yet the company chose to take no action to protect profits.

Similar, Haugen has accused the company of time and time again prioritising profits over social health and of stifling change in front of several legislative committee hearings in the United States, Europe and the United Kingdom.