Facebook Still Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Still Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race

propublica.org

131 pointstopspin96 comments

The text of the law[0] is surprisingly clear that FB's acceptance of these ads is illegal (unless I'm missing something big).

    As made applicable by section 3603 of this title and except as exempted by
    sections 3603(b) and 3607 of this title, it shall be unlawful—
    ...
    (c) To make, print, or publish, or cause to be made, printed, or published
    any notice, statement, or 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, or an intention to make any such preference, limitation, or
    discrimination.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/3604#c

The ads aren't discriminating are they?

This seems identical to posting paper ads in primarily white neighborhoods, which I don't think is illegal.

To me the issue is that Facebook said they fixed this, and they haven't.

See, I didn't read it that way.

"…that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination…"

If the ad itself does not mention the preference, then it does not seem to be covered by this clause.

Would it not be analogous to advertising the property to a particular racial or religious group, such as a church bulletin board?

The distribution of the ad is being targeted, but the ad itself does not indicate any preference. It seems as if the latter is the only thing that is deemed illegal by the law.

Am I reading it correctly?

I agree it doesn't seem to violate the letter of this particular law.

But it's close to being the digital version of redlining. Before the Fair Housing Act real estate brokers would show certain houses only to white clients and other houses only to clients of color. That was explicitly deemed illegal. If you see real estate brokers as a medium through which sellers would advertise their houses I don't see how this is much different.

There is a huge difference.

1. Real estate was not easily searchable in the past.

2. An ad is at least one degree away from a broker in this process. The broker works directly with the buyer and seller while an ad passes leads to brokers.

Sometimes I think what real estate agents can't say goes too far.

https://realestate.usnews.com/real-estate/articles/what-your...

The three that stand out are that a real estate agent can't mention crime rates, school ratings, or that a house may not be wheelchair accessible - even if the buyer asks.

That's a bit odd since now all that data is available to the public --why bind the RE agent's hands in this matter? I mean, perhaps in the past they had "insider" knowledge of those particular statistics but not today.

I think you're right, but I'm not sure I'm wrong... yet.

First, I think I misinterpreted paragraph C w.r.t. how it applies to the ads themselves. I think you're right here, that the ads aren't illegal, since they don't do any discriminating in and of themselves.

However, the text of the law seems to say that placing the order for the ads may be illegal. Placing the order would seem to constitute the making of a statement (with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling) that indicates a preference (or intention to make that preference) based on race. I realize that might feel like way too low a bar, but it seems to fit.

IANAL, but that's how it seems to me.

This is about the ads themselves I believe, which these ones are fine.

If this applied to targeting wouldn't it mean I can't target only women for my feminine hygiene product? Therefor wasting insane amounts showing ads to men for a product only women need.

This is part of the fair housing act, it applies specifically to housing, not other retail products.

Are those women going to live in your feminine hygiene product? If not, I am not sure how housing law is applicable to your advertisement?

Because it's explaining why the ads aren't in violation of the rule and the intuition for why this situation isn't covered.

But the rule is only about housing, so I am not sure what the hygiene products have to do with it. Are there special houses that cater only to women? Or to black people? What is different about the house that makes it only appealing to those groups?

I assume so.

I can only speculate why, but communities tend to coalesce around common culture/race, and perpetuate that selection. Ala "Little China".

Recognizing race does not equal being racist at all, imho.

I don't want to live in a society where I can't objectively (in no bad way whatsoever) acknowledge trait differences, whether they be skin colour or hair length.

I think the issue here is the possibility of digital red-lining. While recognizing race is not racist, treating people differently because of their race is racist.

Not necessarily - not showing African Americans spray-tan advertisements as an example - is that racist?

I think where it crosses the line is where we've explicitly made things illegal (such as housing discrimination) due to past bad behavior.

I don't think targeting based on race is wrong, per se. BET shouldn't be forced to advertise to white people, a Christian dating site should be allowed to target Christians, etc. But housing is another category altogether and ad targeting based on protected categories should be disallowed. It sounds like Facebook realizes this and called this a "technical error."

There are not federal laws prohibiting discrimination in spray-tans, because there is not a very long history of horrendous behavior in discrimination in spray-tans.

There is that history, and now those laws, for housing discrimination. Despite those laws, housing discrimination continues to exist. Enforcing those laws is a bare minimum.

> There are not federal laws prohibiting discrimination in spray-tans

Insofar as the spray-tan vendor constitutes a public accommodation, this is untrue. But those laws have different precise contours than those for housing and employment, and would not seem as likely to apply to ad targeting.

Spray-tan is a very good example. However, as the article states - "Housing, employment and credit are the three areas in which federal law prohibits discriminatory ads" and it does make sense for those three areas.

How about if you're advertising for a job as spray-tan tester?

Differentiation is not the same as discrimination. The protected categories exist because harm was done on the basis of these identifiable traits.

If all humanbeings were ethical and always did the right thing (which matched the universally shared definition of the right thing), we wouldn't need these laws. Since neither the universally accepted definition or the universally ethical people exist, we are stuck with the flawed legal system. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make it better though.

There is no such thing as a "universally right thing", and not even laws can force it into existence.

That's the point I was trying to make - it doesn't exist and laws at best convey the ethic that the majority does not care to oppose at the time of enactment.

I'm interpreting (the first part of) your post as "humans cant do the right thing so we need laws to force them to do it".

I know the right thing for me. I don't need laws telling me about the right thing for me. No other human, or law, can know the right thing for me. And I humbly accept that neither can I know what's the right thing for others, nor construct laws that could guide any other person to the right thing for them.

"I don't need that law telling me the right thing for me" probably wouldn't go over that well in court but if you want to try it then go for it.

The nice thing about laws is that they aren't asking for your permission. They aren't a suggestion, they are telling you things you can't do. If you don't like them you are free to attempt to change the laws but until you do that it's literally "obey or else."

That's not where I was going with this and I'll respectfully disagree with your statement because in a society, there has to be a balance between conflicting interests. If what is good for me will cause harm to you, societies generally will want to limit the extent of the harm, so that some socially acceptable balance exists. It's not always all that well balanced or well implemented, but it tends to be adequate on very catastrophic things.

But again, all human systems are flawed in different ways and it's extremely important to recognize those limitation and consequences, and not just let systems grind people up.

Do you really not think that only allowing certain races to rent houses isn't racist? Please google redlining.

Of course that's racist, but I was referring to recognizing race, not if such ability were to be used for redlining which is despicable.

What use in real estate is "recognizing" race, apart from discriminating based on it?

Better (targeted) advertisement.

To elaborate on another poster, in sales that are both high-value (to warrant extra effort from the advertiser) and not a commodity but with a high emotional value (like buying a home), it would certainly make business sense to ensure that the pictures in the advertising material contain people like themselves, and that requires recognizing race. Minorities respond well to ads that show members of their particular group.

The same goes with many other viewpoints - you might have a version of your advertising material with a same sex couple, but (as e.g. the recent Starbucks ad situation shows) take care that certain groups of more conservative people don't get that ad but get some other version.

Why? You can set difference prices for age, gender, and profession when it comes to insurance products because different demographics have different risk. What's so different about race?

Re-read the parent comment, you are in agreement.

Actually, you can't by gender, under obamacare. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/17/obamacare-women_n_...

You can discriminate by gender for car insurance. From DMV:

"Why Women Pay Less for Car Insurance The statistics tend to show that as a group, women are less likely to: Get into a car accident."

https://www.dmv.org/insurance/how-gender-affects-auto-insura...

Sucks to be a black person in such a society, though. For no reason other than their skin color they are lumped in with a group of people lower average prosperity and then are denied access to resources and systems because of this grouping. Especially when these disparities are themselves caused by a history of deliberate oppression. How convenient that we get to continue to perpetuate inequalities that were themselves caused by the group in the majority. The grouping itself is a problem and produces false or misleading ideas about individuals.

Men are far more likely to commit violent crimes than women. Should employers and landlords be able to blanket deny access to men?

Employers and landlords should be able to deny access to anyone they please. It's their company and their property, after all.

A company that doesn't rely on the resources and services of society can argue that. But a company that wants to rely on any infrastructure like roads or electricity, and a landlord relying on the socially enforced theory of property, is not in that group.

That's a bad argument. There's no choice but to use roads, there's no way to create roads without government permission, there's no way to build any infrastructure without complying with myriad of expensive regulations (and for many things there are no way at all - try to build something where government doesn't want to permit something to be built) and they are paid with taxes that aren't exactly voluntary too. So the logic goes is "we control all the environment, we take money from you to create infrastructure the way we want and we ban you from competing with us - and then we demand from you compliance because you have no choice but to use the infrastructure".

If there were an option to use government infrastructure or create and use independent one, then demands on the users of the government one could be justified - our infrastructure, our rules. But instead, there is no choice and the government actively suppresses the possibility of choice arising - in this case, making some demands for using the only possibility available is hypocritical at best.

It's not a bad argument. You are describing a feature not a bug.

You are free to vote for policies and candidates that will make things the way you want them to be. I'm sure you have. Luckily a majority of us over time have voted against you and decided housing discrimination is wrong and made it illegal. The fact that you lack the choice to do it anyway is intentional.

Yep, one of the costs of living in society is that you have to follow some rules. If you don't like it, feel free to find somewhere else to live... although sadly, every spot of land is already taken. Sorry about that.

> Yep, one of the costs of living in society is that you have to follow some rules.

Another bad argument. Nobody argues agains having some rules. But that does not make every rule necessary. Especially ones that are justified by "since we have these rules that force you to use our services, you also owe us to abide by other rules". That's not a good justification, that's just circular logic.

It's absolutely morally indefensible to refuse services because of what someone was born as.

Any company or landlord who does such a thing will go out of business, since any clever competitor will snatch those great deals that those companies and landlords are missing out on.

That is ... not actually true. It'd be great if that's what happened, but we have several decades of discriminatory housing/credit policies that haven't put companies out of business. _Equifax_ started primarily as a tool to help people discriminate.

Or other racist will seek them out, which is what used to happen before regulation was passed to prevent people from blatantly discriminating.

I would love to live in the world you describe, but that is not this world.

Were you... born yesterday?

Not if that property benefits from any public services. Once the public is subsidizing something (like roads, mail, utilities, education, emergency services, etc), the public gets some say in who gets to be included.

I agree with this, but as long as the public services are a forced upon monopoly this doesn't really work.

> Men are far more likely to commit violent crimes than women. Should employers and landlords be able to blanket deny access to men?

No, but they're more likely to get in more car wrecks, and I have to pay a higher insurance premium because guys on average are worse drivers.

This is a topic that HN is particularly tone deaf on. Bringing this up tends to be seen as an attack on white or Asian people.

I'm really confused because it seems most people haven't used these tools.

In reality, people respond better to people that look like them in ads. People talk about this all the time when talking about "representation."

Say you have a housing and want to target "families" -

It's probably smart to create the following ad groups:

* White families

* Black families

* Hispanic families

* Mixed families

* And however many more depending on ad group size.

Then you'd create a specific ad using images that reflect those families. That's pretty standard online ad management + part of the reason why so much spend has shifted online - it can be a lot more precise.

Sure, you could get one image and blanket target everyone, but I would bet your ROI gets beat by the above strategy.

Is that not just the tech equivalent of "Separate but Equal"?

I don't think so - unless you consider an ad a service.

No. It's called ad optimization.

Just as an educational aside, I think many people are mistaken about what the “separate but equal” decision in Plessy v. Ferguson actually was. I always used to think the decision said that it’s okay for restaurants and other buildings to provide separate restrooms and facilities for different ethnicities, but it was actually more than that. The decision said that it’s okay for state government to require all business to provide separate facilities.

I think it’s a bad thing to do either way, for the record. Forgive me for hijacking your comment to throw in a little factoid.

That's true, but the article describes something that goes a step further. You don't even show ads to certain groups. Now, I'll agree that the distinction between having targeted ads and having targeted ads where one of the targets is basically No Ad starts to look like an odd distinction.

Furthermore pre-digital, no one would have had any serious issue in only running ads in publications known to have specific readership demographics. (Like "families" which itself is a demographic.)

And no one would have issues if these were ads targeted at specific blogs or other sites with a demographic different from almost everyone like Facebook is.

A point below made the case that this gets tricky with other things like medical. Should you force someone to run "no ads" to a demo that isn't their target market. Obviously since this is housing/race, that gets a messy quick. But, if you forced advertisers fb-wide to advertise to an audience that isn't their target market, you could be spending a ton of money targeting people who won't buy.

I don't know the legal aspects for housing related advertisements, so maybe fb makes it there are a specific criteria of goods that have limited targeting options, but having a set of people to show "no ads" to that aren't likely buyers is what you spend most of your time doing through "optimization"

There are specific laws against housing discrimination and targeting that don't apply to other products.

It's probably smart to create the following ad groups

Why?

Then you'd create a specific ad using images that reflect those familiar.

How much better performing are ads that display a demographic than those that display a mix? Isn't this essentially pandering to racial prejudices? "We only want our ads to be seen by people who value skin color."

You suggest a bet on ROI, have you previously done this research?

> You suggest a bet on ROI, have you previously done this research?

I used to run a lot of social media ads, and I would bet the same thing. Little stuff like this usually makes a huge difference in click-through rates.

It depends on the ad, but broadly speaking yes - -people respond to people who look like them.

Source: been doing online marketing for the last 7 year. Managed spend for multiple fortune 500 companies.

If you have a budget and would like to run a test, I'd be happy to show you ;)

I’m sure that’s true. I wonder if you know of any data on the performance of ads featuring diversity (in skin color, age, regional/cultural attire, etc.)

Ads and marketing images featuring such diversity is also pretty common. Apple is a great example of a company that does this. My guess would be that it performs well for some people and poorly for others, based on a number of factors.

I think these filters that Facebook provides are troublesome, but I also don’t have an inherent problem with showing people ads featuring images of people who look similar to them (whether it’s skin color, gender, socioeconomic status, interest/activities, etc.)

I can’t think of a strong reason to oppose such targeting, assuming the level of ad exposure itself isn’t targeting based on features irrelevant to the product being advertised. I oppose targeting real estate ads based on skin color, since that is irrelevant, but I don’t oppose targeting ads based on directly relevant factors (e.g. high-end condos for wealthy people, NBA tickets for people who like “basketball” on Facebook, gender-targeted attire or toiletries, etc.)

That said, I realize that drawing the line may not be so easy in many cases, and there may still be societal consequences that I oppose (a prominent example being the traditional concepts of which types of toys are intended for children of each gender, although I have my own opinions on the separate issue of targeting ads at children).

Once again, for the people in the back:

This would be fine, if our country didn't have a horrific history of oppressive and violent racism that resulted in the immiseration of millions upon millions of individuals, many of them American citizens.

We have that history, we are still struggling under the weight of that history (some more than others, of course), and that is why we "can't have nice things".

Think of it this way, there's a lava flow running right next to the village you live in, which means you have to be careful not to do things that would get people killed. Sure, this can be restrictive at times, but, you know, there's frickin' lava. Right. There. For some reason a lot of people (they tend to have something in common, not sure what) don't see the entrenched institutionalized racism in this country, nor do they seem to consider it a serious problem. It is one of the most serious problems that continues to face this country, and historians are going to damn us (yes us, you, me, all of us) for not having dealt with it properly for far too long. Concerns like the effectiveness of advertisements are so far down the rungs compared to this problem that they aren't worth caring about.

But "race" isn't actually the same thing as "skin colour or hair length".

"Race" is really a social/cultural concept, it is specific to a particular country/society.

Most official forms in the US seem to believe humans can be classified into five races: "White", "Black or African American", "American Indian or Alaska Native", "Asian", "Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander"

(Source: https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html )

None of those categories bears a straightforward relation to physical characteristics. e.g. "Asian" includes a wide range of skin tones, from quite pale to quite dark.

And only Americans categorise humans in this way. Other countries either categorise them differently, or eschew racial classification entirely. e.g. "Asian" in the UK has a narrower meaning than it does in the US.

    ... objectively (in no bad way whatsoever) acknowledge
    trait differences ...

This is like the "frictionless surface" of sociology. It sure sounds like a great thing to shoot for, but our laws carry centuries (if not millennia) of cultural baggage along with them. It's nigh impossible to craft policies that aim only at the ideal, and ignore people's heavy emotional priors (e.g., if you're a person of race A who grew up amidst feelings of animosity towards people of race B that were brought on by centuries of physical and emotional trauma).

There is a historical context to why the fair housing act was instituted. For example, I am a minority that lives in a county that was infamous for being "whites only" just 30 years ago.

Sorry, there are limits to how far that is allowed to go. As with so many things, bad actors ruin things for everyone else, forcing onerous rules, regulations, and laws to prevent their bad actions from having too great a negative impact on society as a whole. We tried it the "let's just let things sort themselves out" way, and it didn't work, to the detriment of massive negative impact on the lives of people of color specifically. It's important to realize that it doesn't take a majority of white society to create a preference cascade which is horribly exclusionary toward non-whites, that's why we have the laws the way they are.

Can any attorney with knowledge of fair housing weigh in on this? Law quotes states that the ad cannot say these things, but the publishing of an ad in a medium targeted based on these seems like a relatively new ground, since the ad itself is likely fine, but how it is distributed is definitely not in the spirit of the law.

In finance, I'm fairly sure zip+4 is off limits in many pricing models for this exact reason - it is too specific. However, I'm not aware of anything like this in advertising publishing that a given ad has to have a chance of being seen regardless of the protected categories.

Regardless of the law, it's definitely extremely unethical to do this.

It's not new ground, nor do I believe it to be necessarily unethical.

People can and do advertise in predominantly white settings or black settings, e.g. a church or a sports game or a magazine.

Advertising has always, always, always been a numbers game. Didn't advertise on billboards in the middle of Wyoming? Maybe because there was lower ROI than elsewhere.

Techmeme summary: ProPublica: Ads for housing that exclude demographics are still being approved by Facebook, a year after a study highlighted the illegal discriminatory practice on Facebook

Is there a non-negligible fraction of ads that do this for this to be an actual problem? Or is it another article riding the wave of the media crusade against Facebook? Genuine question, I don't have a Facebook account and I live in a country rather separated from the racial discrimination concerns present in the US.

I think the main beef is with PACs targeting political ads by race.

Facebook doesn't publish what interest categories and demographics go into their ads (aka you can't click on an ad in FB and see what led to it being shown to you).

But we're talking billions of dollars a year in ads, of which real estate is a respectable percentage (FB is very good at doing geographic targeting).

And you certainly also have these relatively unsupervised and opaque "interest categories" that are being presented to advertisers.

Someone explained to me a while ago, in New York State, it was illegal to discriminate on race, color, religion, sex, etc. for renting out apartments in 3+ unit dwellings.

As an owner of a single home, renting out the upstairs apartment, it was supposedly perfectly OK to discriminate based on those things.

I never dug into this, but if it is true, the question is: "Should Facebook ad tools facilitate such discrimination, even if it is not forbidden by law?".

It's this federal law the Fair Housing Act, not state law, that has an exception for smaller properties where the owner lives (New York may further extend federal protections). The exception only allows discrimination in not allowing someone to live there, it's still illegal to advertise in a discriminatory way.

https://fairhousing.foxrothschild.com/2010/06/articles/fha-b...

If people keep following the logical end of this, then facebook and google's entire business model is going to implode on itself.

All of online marketing is basically segmenting populations by various group traits. It says nothing about the individual, but as a marketer you think in those broad categories that maybe, just maybe different ages, races, locations might respond differently to ads.

Are you using the slippery slope fallacy to argue against the existence of federal protected classes?

Isn't the argument one about targeting ads to the right people? I don't need to see ads online for statin drugs. Should drug manufacturers be required to show their statin drug ads to me?

Nope.

I'm just saying that if you remove the ability to target ads based on specific person characteristics, you remove a piece of what makes fb so valuable of an advertising platform (that is to target people so microscopically).

Just pointing it out.

The number of products to which such non-discrimination law applies to is vanishingly small though. It's not illegal, for instance, to racially target advertisements for flagship smartphones towards white people (since white people tend to be richer and thus have more disposable income), not that any marketing agency would do that in practice.

Completely avoiding bias in advertisement is an exercise in futility. Are you a toy manufacturer? Advertise on children's TV shows - not that such a marketing strategy states that adults will never buy the toys, or that the business of adults buying such toys for themselves is unwelcome. Are you a cosmetics manufacturer? Advertise in cisfemale interest magazines - not that such a marketing strategy states that noncisgender individuals will never buy cisfemale-targeted cosmetics, or that the business of noncisgender individuals buying such cosmetics for themselves is unwelcome.

> Completely avoiding bias in advertisement is an exercise in futility.

That's not the point of the ad system. The point is to optimize inventory + bidding. So you can bid on all of those -sure, but if you have the capability to break down children toy ads to children + to adults - you do it and have different strategies for both (broad based appeal to kids and buy-action to parents). You can be more precise with the ads + the spend so it makes sense to do it.

I am pretty sure those two companies don't have their entire business model revolving around housing, so I am not sure where you think the logical end of this is going to be.

Unless all ads are for real estate where there are specific laws about how you can and cannot sell houses, I don't see the relevance.

Not to de-rail the thread, but man, FB's slide here has been fast. Just about 1 year ago we were talking about 'fake news' as a threat separate from FB. FB was still considered 'neutral' at worst, if not a 'good' thing.

Now? It seems like everyone hates them. Not that they are doing themselves favors at all, but them and Uber are downright villains now.

They can just advertise to people who like Bing Crosby instead.

And that's not all, I hear they're still letting make-up advertisers to exclude users by gender.

Do these laws really yield results?

If somebody doesn't want to rent to or hire a person of a certain race they just won't. They may be forced to not be specific in their ad, but in the end they still won't call you back.

Right... This is basically what happens in a neighborhood like Chinatown, where they can't explicitly deny you because you aren't Chinese but you won't be signing a lease any time soon. Maybe it's because I'm currently reading "The Sellout," but I don't think that it's universally bad to have a practice like that. I don't want Chinatown to be filled with white people. It's different when the people being denied housing actually can't find housing anywhere because the practice is so ubiquitous.

For a single person renting out one house, they will get away with it. But for an apartment complex, they can get investigated and have secret shoppers come in and then they get in trouble for not treating the two marker customers the same.

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