Facebook Provides Crises Help Functionality, Updates Anti-Discrimination Ad Policies

Facebook is unveiling a feature that helps people provide assistance to and communicate with others immediately after a crisis, wrote Naomi Gleit, vice president-social good, in a Wednesday blog post. The "community help" function is an update to the company's "safety check" feature, which was launched in 2014 and lets users tell friends and family they're all right after a crisis, she said. Called Community Help, the feature is being launched in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. for the first couple of weeks for natural and accidental incidents before it's made more widely available and for more types of incidents, she said. In a separate blog post, Facebook said it updated policies, resources and tools to better enforce rules against discriminatory advertising on its site after the company was criticized last year for permitting advertisers to potentially discriminate against users by race. "We make it clear that advertisers may not discriminate against people based on personal attributes such as race, ethnicity, color, national origin, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family status, disability, medical or genetic condition," it said. The company said it created a new section that provides more information on anti-discrimination policy and educational resources from agencies and civil rights groups that specialize in fighting such discrimination. Facebook is also testing machine learning technology to spot credit opportunity, employment and housing ads -- "the types of advertising stakeholders told us they were concerned about" -- by "disapproving" them and providing the updated policy.