Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race

propublica.org

Caucasians are a category that can be selected from that list too, right? So, the article lead should be ammended from:

"Facebook’s system allows advertisers to exclude black, Hispanic, and other “ethnic affinities” from seeing ads."

To this:

"Facebook’s system allows advertisers to exclude white, black, Hispanic, and other “ethnic affinities” from seeing ads."

This is a good example of lying by omission. Ethically, there is nothing wrong with this system if the exclusion can be applied equally to any ethnic group.

And besides, we need this for practical reasons: there are special creams for people of certain pigments that won't work for my vanilla face...

> Caucasians are a category that can be selected from that list too, right?

Not according to Gruber[1]:

UPDATE: Their filter lets you screen out Asian-Americans, African-Americans, and Hispanics, but it doesn’t let you screen out white people? How did anyone at Facebook think this was a good idea?

[1]https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers...

I don't use FB (privacy concerns and commercialization of human beings) so give the interested source benefit of the doubt.

So FB has made an oversight. The engineers and designers should do the politically correct thing here and add white people as a category. Most importantly, the special creams advertisers...

That doesn't really solve the problem of them explicitly creating a platform for discriminatory advertising.

This is also the sort of thing where I have to ask, how many people of color were apart of the design and implementation of this functionality?

> Ethically, there is nothing wrong with this system if the exclusion can be applied equally to any ethnic group.

That is only shifting the responsibility to the person clicking (or not clicking) the checkbox.

... thereby exonerating Facebook from the racial discrimination imputed to its advertising problem.

Are you really suggesting that platform providers are fully accountable for the abusive use of their services?

It shouldn't be an option. So yes, they are accountable.

Discrimination does not only apply to race. So even if they didn't exclude users by race, but, say, by profession, then it would still be discrimination. In fact, most of what "big data applied to personal data" does amounts to discrimination.

Discrimination seems to always have a negative tone nowadays, but in some contexts it is a virtue. E.g. "he has discriminating tastes". I hope any AI I make is discriminating.

For better or worse, what we accept depends on the situation. For example, health insurance discriminates on gender, race, and age, all of which are illegal to discriminate on in employment matters.

Personally, I find advertising to be in the "okay" category for racial discrimination. Advertisers essentially pay for Facebook users' data (which is why Facebook is free as in beer), and use that data to target ads. For example, some cosmetic lines cater to dark skin, and racial discrimination keeps their ads relevant.

You choose your profession, but race largely corresponds with personal qualities not of your choosing. I'd imagine this is particularly true when it comes to Facebook's inference of a person's race, since I'm pretty sure it's not user-supplied.

> Satterfield added that the “Ethnic Affinity” is not the same as race — which Facebook does not ask its members about. Facebook assigns members an “Ethnic Affinity” based on pages and posts they have liked or engaged with on Facebook.

You're right that discrimination, taken broadly, is a morally neutral concept. But the law establishes protected classes to attempt to prevent people from be disadvantaged or disenfranchised due to qualities society feels are unacceptable to discriminate by.

And there's something especially galling about the fact that this functionality excludes people of ethnic categories for targeting, rather than targeting products of particular interest. Both are pretty bad though.

This is most likely illegal. Facebook will have to get rid of it to avoid bad PR, if nothing else. If Facebook doesn't move fast to contain this story I could see it becoming a big deal in the press.

Older discussion, but from arstech: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12818002

Reply on news.ycombinator.com