Meta Special Ad Category Requirements

This document is a Meta Business Help Centre guidance page governing the use of Special Ad Categories within Meta's advertising platform, grounded in Meta's Advertising Policies and applicable anti-discrimination law including the US Fair Housing Act, Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and related employment discrimination statutes. The document states that advertisers running campaigns related to credit, employment, housing, or social issues, elections, and politics must self-select the applicable Special Ad Category before campaign creation, and that failure to do so or misclassification may result in ad disapproval or account-level enforcement action. The Special Ad Category designation restricts the audience selection tools available to advertisers, specifically prohibiting targeting by age, gender, zip code, and certain detailed interest categories that could function as proxies for protected characteristics under US civil rights law and analogous frameworks in other jurisdictions. This policy engages the US Fair Housing Act, Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, as well as EU non-discrimination directives and GDPR considerations around profiling for sensitive decisions; enforcement authority in the US context includes the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Advertisers operating in financial services, real estate, recruitment, and political advocacy verticals face heightened compliance obligations, as misuse of targeting parameters in these categories has been the subject of prior regulatory and civil litigation scrutiny.