Facebook develops Topic Exclusion Controls for advertisers

Topic Exclusion Controls, a new feature being developed by Facebook would enable advertisers to supervise the placement of their ads to ensure it appears next to content based on brand suitability.

Topic Exclusion Controls will allow advertisers to select subjects or themes of content that would not be appropriate to appear next to their ads on the Facebook News Feed. The feature would only be tested with a small group of advertisers in the beta phase.

Advertisers can select topics that they do not want their ads to appear next to. For instance, a children's toy company can select 'Crime And Tragedy', or a company can also select topics based on research that have come up as not suitable for their ads.

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The content surfacing on Facebook recently has been under the heat after US Elections and the attack on the Capitol, a lot of which has been touted as hate speech, misinformation, inciting violence, and content that may contribute to creating an unhealthy environment for brands to advertise on the platform.

The feature in development, if performs its functionality efficiently, would give brands a tool to manage such issues and improve brand safety on the platform. The platform mentions the development of the feature would take about the whole of this year.

While the feature is being developed by Facebook, Twitter has been offering brand safety controls for a while now, recently they also announced their associations with industry partners to maintain a healthy environment for brands to advertise and improve brand safety solutions.