Facebook is under pressure to tackle offensive material on the site after BSkyB became the latest major advertiser to pull its campaigns from the social network.

The pay-TV giant has suspended its marketing campaigns on Facebook after one of its advertisements appeared alongside offensive content earlier this week.

Last month major marketers including Nissan and Nationwide halted campaigns on the social network following concerns about misogynistic content, including images of abused women.

In a statement, BSkyB said: "We have suspended our advertising on Facebook after one of our adverts was found adjacent to offensive material. Such content is clearly unacceptable to Sky and our customers.

"We have asked Facebook to devise safeguards to ensure our content does not appear alongside inappropriate material in the future. We will review the situation in due course."

BSkyB declined to say what offensive content had prompted it to suspend advertising on the site, but it follows pressure on Facebook from women's organisations about sexist and degrading material.

Nearly 100 women's groups wrote an open letter to the social network in May demanding better policing of content that "trivialises or glorifies violence against women and girls". They called for Facebook to recognise this content as hate speech and take swifter action against its proponents.

Facebook has said that it removes the vast majority of mysogynistic content from the site, but that it can take time to monitor the site's almost 100bn pages.

A spokeswoman for Facebook said: "We acted quickly to remove a number of pages that violate our community standards, and are also working on ways to scale our internal processes to prevent these issues from arising in future. We are sensitive to the ways in which these issues can impact our partners and other users and we will continue to work with them and update on our progress."

The social network generated $1.45bn in revenue in the first three months of this year, of which $1.24bn was from advertising.

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