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 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.
Men are far more likely to commit violent crimes than women. Should employers and landlords be able to blanket deny access to men?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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?
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.
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 ;)
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 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).
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.
"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.
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 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.
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.
... objectively (in no bad way whatsoever) acknowledge
trait differences ...
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 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...