NEW YORK, June 29: Facebook has announced a major overhaul of its advertising systems in an attempt to deal with concerns about offensive content which has sparked ire of many human rights groups.

The announcement comes weeks after women’s rights activists and others highlighted several Facebook pages that glorified and encouraged violence against women. Not only that, they noted, in many cases the pages were carrying ads — meaning that some people were making money off of the graphic content.

In response, several advertisers including the British arms of Nissan and Nationwide said they would no longer advertise on Facebook unless the company could guarantee that ads for their companies wouldn’t appear alongside graphic or violent content.

Soraya Chemaly, a Washington-based activist and one of the leaders of last month’s protest, said that while Facebook’s decision makes “logical business sense,” she wants the company to offer more training to those who review its pages for controversial or offensive content.

Chemaly said that she and representatives from women’s groups have been working with Facebook to set up policies on how best to train people looking at this content.

In Britain, where the major advertisers Marks and Spencer and SkyB were among companies to suspend advertising after complaints that adverts had been placed on pages with offensive material.

A BBC report says the social network is now planning to remove any advertising from many of its pages.