Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race - Sensationalist Headlines

[quote]In February, Facebook said it would step up enforcement of its prohibition against discrimination in advertising for housing, employment or credit. But our tests showed a significant lapse in the company’s monitoring of the rental market. Last week, ProPublica bought dozens of rental housing ads on Facebook, but asked that they not be shown to certain categories of users, such as African Americans, mothers of high school kids, people interested in wheelchair ramps, Jews, expats from Argentina and Spanish speakers. All of these groups are protected under the federal Fair Housing Act, which makes it illegal to publish any advertisement “with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin.” Violators can face tens of thousands of dollars in fines. Every single ad was approved within minutes.[/quote] [url]https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-discrimination-housing-race-sex-national-origin[/url] Lots of other ways they fucked with it in the article.

what the fuck. i mean why in this day and age are people still predisposed to say "anyone but jews, that race, this ethnicity, and that nationality." its little systematic bullshit like this that should have been stamped out decades ago and left in the last century.

Not to defend facebook here but [quote] which makes it illegal to publish any advertisement “with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin.” [/quote] is very different than filtering those people out, legally speaking (or so I think anyway, Im no lawyer).

[QUOTE=toaster468;52916835]Not to defend facebook here but [quote]which makes it illegal to publish any advertisement “with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin.”[/quote] is very different than filtering those people out, legally speaking (or so I think anyway, Im no lawyer).[/QUOTE] I imagine there's a pretty clear argument in that only advertising to white people implies a clear preference for white people. The act of publishing indicates the preference; you don't have to explicitly say in the ad, "20% off for whites! Blacks need not apply!" or something like that.

Only showing the advertisement to white people certainly isn't legally the same as saying "only whites" in the ad itself. It probably should be, though.

[QUOTE=Mattk50;52916936]Only showing the advertisement to white people certainly isn't legally the same as saying "only whites" in the ad itself. It probably should be, though.[/QUOTE] Well, the ads are targeting a certain demographic. Ethnic products such as haircare products are not advertised to whites, so should it be targeted towards all people? No. Advertisements target specific demographics. As for the whole housing thing, I don't think ads being targeted towards a certain demographic is the same as saying "no black allowed here folks." There could very easily be more to it, maybe it is targeting specific types of people in accordance to their wealth, status (single, married, etc), whether they have kids or not. Maybe the company feels like that certain demographics fit what they want because of specific experiences they've had. I dunno, it might not be as sinister as we think. Just because they target towards certain demographics doesn't mean they'll say no to someone outside of that demographic range.I think the context matters, but if is just based off of race and nothing else then it is pretty awful. Renting properties is pretty awful in general and a lot of tenants are awful, I've heard far to many horror stories about rental properties.

It seems similar to something like putting up adds only in neighborhoods who have the kind of people you're looking far. I don't know if it's illegal, but this kind of specific targeting does strike me the wrong way, though.

I assumed it's cheaper for them to exclude those people and target those more likely to buy, but excluding jews?

If this isn't illegal, it should be. Atleast for housing, anyways; there's an efficiency in filtering out Caucasians while advertising your hair product made especially for the african americans/africans since it would be less useful/unusable to other races. In this case, however, housing has no distinction for race, so it isn't ethical to filter it out. [editline]23rd November 2017[/editline] [QUOTE=Omesh;52917403]I assumed it's cheaper for them to exclude those people and target those more likely to buy, but excluding jews?[/QUOTE] Even if it was more efficient pricewise, I don't think profit should be the sole grounds of moral principle.

Seems perfectly sensible to me, it would be a waste of money to advertise to people who are unlikely to be interested, and yes that does include housing location, for example where I live the vast majority of people moving here are middle aged white people, not that I'm defending advertising I fucking loathe it but it makes good business sense to target advertising.

What facebook is doing here is fairly obviously enabling illegal discrimination against protected classes, but I wonder how much of a grey area exists. Facebook, much like most other big data type providers, has the ability to impute a ton of information about someone. Theoretically you could prevent ads being seen by poor people, or those on welfare, neither of which is a protected class in most cases. Would such a restriction create an environment that is considered racist or otherwise discriminatory? While you can discriminate against income, many states have restrictions that prevent you from advertising certain things in your listings. A few of them don't let you say "no section 8" in advertisements, but still allow landlords to ban it.

Is the ethics room at facebook just an room used to store chairs with a spider in the corner? I'm starting to wonder that.