Opinion | A Watchful Eye on Facebook’s Advertising Practices - The New York Times
by Olivier Sylvain // Fordham Law School
Before the Department of Housing and Urban Development on Thursday announced that it has charged Facebook with violating the Fair Housing Act by enabling advertisers to engage in housing discrimination, Facebook said that it would change its ad-targeting methods to forbid discriminatory advertisements about housing, employment and credit opportunities. This plan, announced last week, is part of its settlement agreement with the civil rights groups that filed suits against the company over the past few years. The substantive terms are not radical. But they outline a basic framework for how policymakers might begin thinking about reforming big tech in ways that are suited to our times.
Ever since reporting revealed in October of 2016 that Facebook allowed advertisers to exclude users by race, the company has denied any legal wrongdoing. If there is a problem under law, its leaders have said, it is with advertisers. That is why Facebook could claim that it was attending to discrimination by requiring advertisers to certify that they were not violating civil rights laws.
But this was always unconvincing because until last week, Facebook made it possible for advertisers to discriminate against users if they fell into a “multicultural affinity” classification like “Mundo Hispanico” or “Hispanic.” These categories are obvious proxies for race, ethnicity and religion. While people do not have to be a member of a particular group to fall into one of these classifications, the likelihood that they do is significant enough to justify them. This is, in part, why HUD filed a lawsuit against the company.
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