HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook | Hacker News Reader

HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

hud.gov

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These are the specific points they are going after:

    -display housing ads either only to men or women;
    -not show ads to Facebook users interested in an "assistance dog," "mobility scooter," "accessibility" or "deaf culture";   
    -not show ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in "child care" or "parenting," or show ads only to users with children above a specified age;
    -to display/not display ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in a particular place of worship, religion or tenet, such as the "Christian Church," "Sikhism," "Hinduism," or the "Bible."
    -not show ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in "Latin America," "Canada," "Southeast Asia," "China," "Honduras," or "Somalia."
    -draw a red line around zip codes and then not display ads to Facebook users who live in specific zip codes.

The 1st 4 should have never been allowed. This is a 50 year old law. Its not like its something new.

>to display/not display ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in a particular place of worship, religion or tenet, such as the "Christian Church," "Sikhism," "Hinduism," or the "Bible."

It says "such as"; I'm interested if this list includes "synagogue" or "Torah". Is there any place the entire list is included?

I guess you could in theory go buy some ads on fb and see what it lets you scope

No. The point of non-discrimination is not to protect certain classes, but to protect everyone. The list to check against has to grow over time to reflect current usage.

"colanders", "pirates", "meatballs": the Pastafarians are just as much a protected class as Catholics, Jains and Druze.

> the Pastafarians are just as much a protected class as Catholics, Jains and Druze.

Only if they can demonstrate that their religious beliefs are sincere. There have been some court cases along these lines already.

Nobody asks a Christian to confirm that their beliefs are sincere, and that they aren't just pretending to believe in God, for the social benefits it brings.

Have you been watching US politics in the last few years?

At this point people just seem to make the assumption that people like donald trump are just lying about their faith as if it's a completely normal thing to assert about someone.

That exact thing happens in the UK.

https://www.sundaypost.com/news/uk-news/school-places-withdr...

For purposes of going to secondary school, I was raised Catholic. Slightly more completed my case as although my dad was an atheist, my mum thought she was taking it seriously (given how many New Age books and Hindu icons and statues she had, I don’t count her as a proper Catholic).

Well just the last week, the Dutch highest administrative court ruled that Pastafarianism is not a real religion. Do you at least see why (you don't have to agree, just understand)?

I can understand the reasoning. However, that ruling does not apply to the US.

It’s something of a cultural identity issue in the US. Mocking religious beliefs in the abstract is often acceptable, but mocking specific people is far less so.

Like I said, there have been similar court rulings in US. Look up Stephen Cavanaugh for one example.

So, yes, it does apply in US as well - you have freedom of religion, but it has to be an "actual religion", whatever that means. Things might have been different if the Constitution just spoke of freedom of consciousness or some such; but we have what we have.

This, by the way, is one of the reason why the Satanic Temple has been a lot more successful with its lawsuits so far (e.g. https://religiousreproductiverights.com/lawsuit-status/lawsu... - but also numerous cases where a mere threat of a lawsuit causes the local government to change its tune) - because it tries to present itself in a way that makes it clear that trolling isn't the only thing it is about.

There is plenty of nuance here. Washington County, Minnesota is an example of backing down vs FSM.

Really, Cavanaugh's seeking 5 million and an exemption from various prison rules put the issue in different light than officiating marriages.

Which is why the generalizing rulings is tricky and you need to keep jurisdiction in mind.

How much of the responsibility falls on the Landlord, given they created the targeted ad segments?

It's not like the Facebook Ad Manager has a guided wizard for the real estate industry to target prospective tenants.

Facebook knows exactly what kind of advertisers they have on their platform.

https://www.facebook.com/business/success/quadrant-homes

It is not like there is a physical law of responsibility conservation. Multiple entities can carry 100% responsibility.

Bless this comment. I think this is a succinct representation of the struggles we are facing as a society.

Like links in a chain, they are all required for the chain to hold.

Facebook did this or housing companies used the Facebook targeting boolean option to configure ad campaigns in this way?

It doesn't really make a difference, because when housing companies use Facebook's targeting options it is still Facebook who accepts the ad and publishes it on facebook.com.

If you do something illegal because someone asked you to do it, it's still illegal.

It's not obvious to me. If I photocopy an ilegal ad at Kinko's, is it Kinko's fault? If I send an illegal ad via first class mail, is it USPS's fault?

I don't think it's the ad, per say, but the agreement for delivery. It's be like you sending housing ads and asking USPS to only deliver them to men. USPS would probably be on the hook then as well.

Back to your point though, it is a new domain because with your paper examples there is no one who can "undo" the illegal ad. You copy it at Kinko's and it's not like Kinko's is out there delivering it with you. With online platforms, they both Target and deliver these ads and are responsible for continually delivering them.

What a dumb question. No, of course it’s not.

If you ask USPS to display your illegal ad in their window then it certainly is their fault. That would be an actually comparable situation here.

Well, there was a criminal case against FedEx for delivering illegal prescriptions from Internet drug stores. But it got tossed.

Is FedEx marketing itself to drug distributors as a way to filter out the chaff and get straight to the drug users of highest value?

I think not.

Sometimes. They sold it to you.

Example: I worked at a pharmacy with the self-serve digital photo services. A customer brought in a CD and made christmas cards from a family picture.

It turns out the picture was taken by a local photographer the customer had hired. The pharmacy I worked at got the legal notice. Supposedly, we were partly to blame since we profited off of the cards the customer printed. Nevermind the fact that we didn't generally check the customer's pictures, nor could we actually have guessed these were professional vs a good picture.

The customer cropped out the identifying marks. We had all seen pictures that looked professional, both in digital and film form. It seems none of that mattered. It wouldn't be Kinko's fault that you photocopy an illegal ad, but they can be party to the fault by allowing it to be sold.

Now, the USPS probably has completely different laws protecting it. I'm going to guess it is more likely that they try to get you for mail fraud rather than actually hold the USPS responsible.

>a pharmacy with the self-serve digital photo services

...Why does a pharmacy print photographies? I've never heard of a pharmacy selling something that isn't drugs.

In the US and many other countries (I can confirm this is true for Japan), pharmacies are also convenience stores, and sell many other things besides drugs.

https://www.cvs.com/

For instance, here's a US pharmacy chain – notice it mentions photos on the home page.

I did once hear that part of it is historical. That in some places, many years ago, because photo developing was a much more manual process using more primitive means, and given that pharmacists of the time were used to handling and storing chemicals, and carefully following chemical processes and so on, that there was a natural link between the two. This would be back before the time of posting your film to Snappy Snaps, or there being a centralised photo-developing laboratory with an associated chain of collection huts that simply acted as the interface to the public. Once an association is created - exposed film goes to the pharmacy to be developed - it tends to linger.

However, I've not been able to find any evidence of this. It could just be a just-so story.

It's very common in UK for pharmacies to print digital photos (and in the past, develop films). German drug stores also have this service.

If you get photos printed at Walmart (or at least when I tried a few years ago) they make you either sign an indemnification agreement or refuse to print the photos. I remember one issue in particular - my wife had purchased some logos/prints online from someone on Etsy for a friend's baby shower. They still had the watermark on them and Walmart refused to print them without a signed release from the original artist.

That's common on the software from the companies producing the machines (we had it too), and isn't quite enough.

It is pretty ridiculous in these cases, honestly. This particular picture didn't have a "photographer's studio" setup - it was an outdoor picture with the family around a long, metal farm gate and the photographer sold the customer the CD. There wasn't much the store could do to prevent this, and we had to start physically checking a lot of pictures at that store.

The problem with this reasoning is that assuming the content of the ad is not discriminatory, delivering the ad to some subset of your audience is highly unlikely to be illegal. For example, if you're a publisher that owns two magazines, one of which is popular among blacks and another is popular among whites, I don't think it's still illegal to publish ads on one but not the other, again, provided that the ad itself does not have illegal contents. The onus must be on the advertiser because the full extent of the targeting for the given campaign is not knowable for the publisher. Maybe the advertiser wants to reach men on one publisher and women on another publisher, this isn't something any given publisher can fully determine. Given how advertising works and has worked in the past, it's unlikely that any law would put the responsibility on a publisher for an entire campaign to be free of illegal discrimination on the basis of an audience it reaches.

In this case the targeting of the ad is discriminatory and illegal. That is the context of the ad which is just as important as the content.

The geotargeting polygon was literally RED!?!

I can believe that being an oversight, but holy Shit those optics... yikes

For those outside the US who may be wondering why this is so significant:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

Ah, thank you :)

>>In the United States, redlining is the systematic denial of various services to residents of specific, often racially associated, neighborhoods or communities, either directly or through the selective raising of prices.

Redlining does not mean simply drawing red polygons on the map. To be guilty of redlining, Facebook must have known the ethnic/racial/religious composition of the excluded areas and it must have known that the advertisers were using the tools for discrimination. Quite a tall order.

I don't consider it a tall order, it's exactly what I'd expect advertisers to do with these tools, if there was no specific process to prevent them from doing so.

This case hinges on three facts. First, displaying housing ads that exclude protected classes is illegal. Second is that Facebook built tools that allowed advertisers to create said illegal ads. Finally, Facebook had no oversight process to reject potentially illegal ads. The fact that Facebook created tools that allowed advertisers to effectively cause Facebook to break the law in an automated fashion isn't really much of a defense.

What exactly is wrong with excluding certain areas from seeing your ad? If I'm selling high end jewelry, for example, I don't want my ad shown to people in low income areas, because every click is a waste of money. Similarly, a discount store in a bad part of town may want to exclude wealthy neighborhoods, as people from those neighborhoods are unlikely to come to the store. That doesn't seem like something anyone should be upset about...it's common sense.

I guess it's a little more murky when it comes to housing, but how many people in downtown Watts are going to be legitimate potential leads to rent a house in Beverly Hills? I'm not sure that advertisers should be forced to pay for ads to be shown to people that cannot afford or would otherwise not be interested in what they are trying to sell.

IANAL but it seems both from the comments here and common sense that the law only makes ad publishers liable for discriminatory ads, not advertising campaigns that target in a discriminatory way while advertisers are liable for both. Making publishers liable for the latter is also problematic and likely unprecedented because typically publishers do not have this information. Any given publisher only receives some portion of the entire advertising budget for the campaign and cannot possibly know how the rest of the budget is spent and whether the full campaign adds up to being discriminatory.

For example, if you own a newspaper that caters to people of a specific national origin, are you not allowed to accept any housing ads? By definition, any ad placement on that newspaper is discriminatory in terms of targeting - without knowing the full details of the campaign, they cannot verify that the overall targeting is not discriminatory. This means that any law that makes publishers liable must be restricted to the content of the ads and any law that goes after the demographic targeting likely limits liability to the entity - the advertiser or perhaps agencies - who have full control and knowledge of the targeting in question.

Does this make sense?

In most verticals marketers will have a set of ads for different demographics: say gay, suburban, latino, black, Spanish-speaking, etc. Each of those campaigns will have different creative: for example, a real estate ad targeted to latinos will have an image showing a smiling latino couple. I can understand why the marketer would not want to show this creative to white, black, or asians -- given that they're targeting creative for a different group of people. This sort of practice seems fairly benign -- it's not about denying housing, but about targeting creative for different subgroups.

As a gay person, I see this all over the web. Smiling happy gay people buying cars or real estate or whatever. I imagine that behind each of these ads straight people have been de-selected for seeing this ad. But that doesn't mean these advertisers hate straight people or would deny a straight customer. It just means that for that specific ad and creative they were targeting gay people.

The problem is total exclusion, not targeting for sub-groups by campaign. If they wanted to target sub-groups by campaign, they could offer a service to advertise differently to different subgroups. But that’s not at all what’s happening - this is an exclusion of some subgroups, where the only feasible reason for their exclusion is their demographic, rather than the good/service being sold or the type of advertisement.

What you're describing makes sense, but would it not also be possible with inclusion-based targeting instead of exclusion-based targeting?

Is there a difference?

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that inclusionary targeting is legal whereas exclusionary targeting is not, and exclusionary targeting is what's happening. Inclusionary targeting uses logic of the form, "This user corresponds to subgroup A; load content specialized for subgroup A." Exclusionary targeting is of the form, "This user corresponds to subgroup A; do not load any content for this user."

If you'd like to target a specific demographic you can do so using either inclusionary or exclusionary targeting. Only one of those systems also allows you to explicitly exclude one or more groups rather than just target a subset of groups. Your example seems to be a very charitable interpretation of how exclusionary targeting could be used. There's (probably) nothing wrong with it if it's used that way. But you could just as easily use the system you described to prevent a variety of protected demographics from being able to see the advertisement whatsoever.

It’s not even that deep or complicated. You can target however you want to except when it comes to housing. They can’t claim ignorance. When I use to run ads as a landlord in the paper, the paper had specific guidelines in their real estate section and would deny any ad that broke the guideline.

https://www.ajc.com/visitor_agreement_mobile_old/

Equal Housing Opportunity. Any real estate advertising on this website is subject to the Fair Housing Act, which makes it illegal to advertise "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." Georgia state law also forbids discrimination based on these factors, except that it forbids discrimination based on "disability" rather than "handicap." Familial status includes children under the age of 18 living with parents or legal custodians; pregnant women and people securing custody of children under 18. To complain of discrimination call the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development at 800-669-9777.

Anyone who's ever even looked for a roommate on Craigslist has seen all this information, too. I'm actually kind of flabbergasted that Craigslist handles it correctly and Facebook does not, just given how much more competent Facebook seems based on contrasting the look of the two sites.

It’s slightly different with roommates. You can’t discriminate in advertising when it comes to roommate but you can discriminate when it comes to housing according to one ruling.

https://www.sharinghousing.com/what-the-fair-housing-act-mea...

Craigslist says something different.

https://www.craigslist.org/about/FHA#roommates

Under federal Fair Housing law, the prohibition on discriminatory advertisements applies to all situations except the following:

Shared Housing Exemption -- If you are advertising a shared housing unit, in which tenants will be sharing a bathroom, kitchen, or other common area, you may express a preference based upon sex only.

Private Club and Religious Exemptions -- A religious community or private club whose membership is not restricted based upon race, color, or national origin may restrict tenancy only to its members in a property that it owns, and may advertise to that effect.

Housing for Older Persons Exemption -- As discussed below, certain complexes for elderly persons are exempt from prohibitions on familial status discrimination, including the prohibitions on discriminatory advertising.

OK, true, but I've also rented out entire units on Craigslist before too, so I've seen the full disclaimer regardless.

Speaking of which, the Roomi app might potentially be doing illegal things in turning housing search into a social network.

You wrote it backwards. Discriminating on roommates is legal.

The first cite said you couldn’t discriminate in advertising but you could discriminate in selection. Craigslist said something different.

> will be sharing a bathroom, kitchen, or other common area, you may express a preference based upon sex only.

I wonder if someone who has a particular dietary restriction (kosher, halal, gluten free, vegan, etc.) can express a preference for a like minded person.

As long as it’s not a protected class. For instance, I was once a hiring manager and everyone I was talking to was shocked when I said I would rather hire someone older and more stable. They thought I was opening them up to a lawsuit. Being under 40 is not a protected class. Being over 40 is.

I also told the recruiter that I wasn’t going to hire a guy because he smelled like cigarette smoke, I would be working closely with him and it bothered my asthma. Cigarette smoking is not protected in some states - including mine.

My understanding is that the "shared housing" clause is still only applying to landlords, not individuals seeking a roommate.

So if you're the Catholic Church running a women's boarding house on the upper east side of Manhattan, you are allowed to advertise to (and rent to) only women, but you can't restrict it further to only Catholic women.

Craigslist says the same thing

>Decision-making: Although the prohibition on discriminatory advertising applies to roommate and shared housing situations, federal Fair Housing laws do not cover the basis of decisions made by landowners who own less than four units, and live in one of the units. This means that in a situation in which a landlord owns less than four rental units, and lives in one of the units, it is legal for the owner to discriminate in the selection process based on the aforementioned categories, but it is illegal for that owner to advertise or otherwise make a statement expressing that discriminatory preference.

Upvoted. I'm not saying there isn't an issue (my spidey sense says there is) but taking an advert in isolation doesn't prove anything.

> As a gay person, I see this all over the web. Smiling happy gay people buying cars or real estate or whatever.

Good lord. Does that mean that so many advertisers track your activities so thoroughly that they figured out you're gay?

In the case of Facebook, you either put this in your profile, or the kinds of pages and events that you like and interact with will give this away.

Not saying that it's not creepy, just that with the way we use the internet these days, it's not an epic feat for an advertiser to figure this out given the amount of data we put out there.

Actually in this case it's pretty easy. If you're gay and use dating apps, and didn't opt out of application usage history in your settings, the presence of those apps in your history will flag you as having that interest to advertisers. The google analytics get resold/repackaged, either directly or indirectly through data brokers, to Facebook. Facebook suddenly starts displaying ads for expensive mens' underwear.

Really? Google Analytics repackages and sells user data to third party data brokers?

Ha, I get ads on FB for expensive men's underwear. Their algorithms clearly have room for improvement.

> Does that mean that so many advertisers track your activities so thoroughly that they figured out you're gay?

There was a thing a few years back where Target was able to determine if someone was pregnant based on their purchasing habits [0].

Facebook, Google and others gather and track orders of magnitude more information than Target could ever dream of can certainly figure out if you are gay, straight, and anything else.

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....

You're missing the point, though, which is not that the advertisers can target the models in the ads, but so they can choose _not_ to show ads to "undesireable" people, like people with kids, or of a certain ethnicity or religion. This sort of practice is an extremely pervasive problem that has led to enormous amounts of systemic inequality.

What is the problem with not showing rental ads to people with kids?

If landlord does not want to rent out to people with kids - I (as a parent with kids) do NOT want to see that ad.

How forcing landlord to advertise to categories they do not want to serve -- would help to anybody?

The problem is that it is illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Housing_Act You can't choose to rent based on familial status.

I understand and agree that it's wrong. On a purely theoretical level, I think the question is philosophical. They're not turning these people away, just not trying to draw them in. This happens elsewhere in society, right or wrong. Examples: gay bars, "black" churches, biker establishments.

It’s is specifically illegal to advertise real estate based on such criteria.

https://nationalfairhousing.org/responsibleadvertising/

I can't reply to you cabaalis, but the difference is excluding (discriminating) versus targeting. Targeting is legal, discriminating is not.

As in the Alamo Drafthouse is more than welcome to have a women's night event for a particular movie, but if they refuse men at the door solely for their gender, that is illegal.

https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/alamo-drafthouse-admi...

That's just a municipal ordinance and not a Constitutional result. It's not much of a result.

I live in Austin and support the Drafthouse's lighthearted attempt to offer women an opportunity to enjoy themselves by themselves.

Targeting is not legal when it comes to real estate advertising.

Listen, in most cities they turn away men based on gender, or make them pay a cover, while they let well-dressed women in. That is their business model. I guess they can claim that men's attraction to women is a compelling business reason, which I believe may be an exception to the anti-discrimination laws. Similar to women-only gyms saying that women's desire to avoid men while working out is a compelling business reason.

I am not a lawyer but it always struck me as unfair to a whole gender to treat them differently when they want to enter nightclubs. But of course this policy is also very ageist, biased against heavyset people etc. So do we ban that as well, since it's not something people can control?

Both situations you have cited are actually probably in violation of the law.

The issue is that nobody is really going to be bothered to spend the money to haul those things into court.

If I'm willing to spend that much money, I can apply that same amount of money and wind up using it far more effectively than getting into a specific club or gym.

I am sure there are plenty of people with money to burn if they could win such a case and make a point in the national news. In fact, they did and LOST. I don’t think such a case is winnable. Even by a seasoned lawyer.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/judge-rules-nightclub-en...

http://musicfeeds.com.au/news/dude-sues-melbourne-nightclub-...

Even a place which excludes men openly is allowed to operate, though this is borderlin. Lucille Roberts was a successful chain of female-only gyms advertising itself nationwide as just for women.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/04/women-only-social-c...

> the difference is excluding (discriminating) versus targeting. Targeting is legal, discriminating is not.

Can you articulate a difference between "targeting" and "discriminating", other than one being legal and one being illegal?

Targeting means saying it's a Foo themed event, discriminating means banning non-Foo from entry.

I wonder about the distinctions legally given machine based tools and context insensitivity and what separates identical results.

If one had a list of proxies for every ethnicity and individually assigned all but one would it qualify as legal targeting or illegal discrimination?

Would this format derived from US ethnicity census be legal: [x] White [] Black or African American [x] American Indian or Alaska Native [x] Asian or Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander

but a query of 'exclude "Black or African American"' be considered illegal even if they both map to an abbreviated form of hexadecimal B? Although it could be argued that by making the discriminators have to work harder to figure out how to exercise bigotry in advertising is a reasonable baseline.

The spirit of the law is clear but I wonder about the mechanics of it for avoiding all of the gross loopholes and technicalities and enforceability. Just advertising home listings in 'Farmer's Weekly' (for sake of example assuming it has an overwhelmingly white subscriber base) for selling an exurban house wouldn't prove discriminatory intent and short of memos giving racist directives to the marketing department being released.

Could you please explain how exactly Fair Housing Act makes Facebook filtering illegal?

Lack of advertising is not the same as "refuse to sell".

It says right on the wiki page: Advertising the sale or rental of a dwelling indicating preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, disability or national origin.

Tech has changed so you can do the targeting. You are violating the spirit of the law. The point is if you make sure blacks, Mexicans, or women can't see your ad you are trying to exclude them.

But privately filtering who this ad will show to -- is NOT the same as publicly "advertising ... indicating preference".

> You are violating the spirit of the law.

No.

The spirit of the law is to prohibit public racial propaganda. The spirit of the law is NOT about hunting down private biases.

> The spirit of the law is to prohibit public racial propaganda. The spirit of the law is NOT about hunting down private biases.

I have no idea what you’re talking about with the “propaganda”, but everything you need to know is right there in the announcement: “The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in housing transactions including print and online advertisement on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, disability, or familial status. HUD's Secretary-initiated complaint follows the Department's investigation into Facebook's advertising platform which includes targeting tools that enable advertisers to filter prospective tenants or homebuyers based on these protected classes.”

So both the spirit and letter of the law forbid discrimination, and they are arguing that Facebook enables illegal discrimination on their platform.

dennisgorelik is correct, and you are wrong, as to a specific scenario which I would still consider to be a "housing transaction". It is 100% legal to discriminate on the basis of race, sex, or any other characteristic at all when choosing a roommate (a special form of renting out your property). It is 100% illegal to place advertisements indicating that you will reject roommates based on race, sex, or other protected characteristic. So in that case, the law is very specifically about the contents of the advertisement, not about the behavior of discriminating against certain renters.

So are you saying it's not the spirit and letter of the Fair Housing Act to forbid discrimination? Or are you saying that HUD is not arguing that Facebook enables illegal discrimination on their platform?

Well, since housing discrimination is fully legal under some circumstances, I would indeed say that it is neither the spirit nor the letter of the Fair Housing Act to forbid discrimination. What is the alternative view?

> discrimination in housing transactions

"Advertising housing" is NOT "housing transaction". Transaction happens when landlord and renter signing renting agreement.

I haven't expressed an opinion either way - I'm just quoting what the linked article says.

The FHA clearly regulates housing advertising.

>>(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.

There is no indication of preference/limitation/discrimination in the content that reaches the end user of Facebook.

But there is selective use of advertising to target specific markets, which is an issue about which the Code of Federal Regulations, section 109.25 (https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/DOC_7781.PDF) is completely clear:

> § 109.25 Selective use of advertising media or content.

> The selective use of advertising media or content when particular combinations thereof are used exclusively with respect to various housing developments or sites can lead to discriminatory results and may indicate a violation of the Fair Housing Act. For example, the use of English language media alone or the exclusive use of media catering to the majority population in an area, when, in such area, there are also available non-English language or other minority media, may have discriminatory impact. Similarly, the selective use of human models in advertisements may have discriminatory impact. The following are examples of the selective use of advertisements which may be discriminatory:

> (a) Selective geographic advertisements. Such selective use may involve the strategic placement of billboards; brochure advertisements distributed within a limited geographic area by hand or in the mail; advertising in particular geographic coverage editions of major metropolitan newspapers or in newspapers of limited circulation which are mainly advertising vehicles for reaching a particular segment of the community; or displays or announcements available only in selected sales offices.

> (b) Selective use of equal opportunity slogan or logo. When placing advertisements, such selective use may involve placing the equal housing opportunity slogan or logo in advertising reaching some geographic areas, but not others, or with respect to some properties but not others.

> (c) Selective use of human models when conducting an advertising campaign. Selective advertising may involve an advertising campaign using human models primarily in media that cater to one racial or national origin segment of the population without a complementary advertising campaign that is directed at other groups. Another example may involve use of racially mixed models by a developer to advertise one development and not others. Similar care must be exercised in advertising in publications or other media directed at one particular sex, or at persons without children. Such selective advertising may involve the use of human models of members of only one sex, or of adults only, in displays, photographs or drawings to indicate preferences for one sex or the other, or for adults to the exclusion of children.

Targeted advertising was already a thing when these regulations were written decades ago; internet advertising is just a difference in scale and cost.

The lengths at which you are going to rationalize racism just astounds me.

Answer me this. How on Facebook you would expect an excluded person to be able to know about the sale?

They wouldn't. The housing listing doesn't exist for them.

How do you see this as fair?!

I am blown away by all the casual racism all throughout this thread.

I am convinced half these commenters are just being disingenuous just for the sake of it. These sorts of cases are settled and straightforward, we have a half century of case law plus multiple publications from HUD that directly address this issue. Craigslist actually does an excellent job of summarizing the laws and giving specific examples of illegal advertisements.

https://www.craigslist.org/about/FHA

It may be easier to believe they are being disingenuous but the real answer is probably that they are in fact racist.

Its a hard truth to swallow.

The rest of this isn't directed just at you astura.

If this was some random Facebook or 4chan comment would you be so quick to come to that rationalization?

I feel we like to think the individuals we associate with on HN are like minded. To admit they aren't is almost a personal affront. To keep the disillusion going we must rationalize and make up excuses for them or how they behave.

But sometimes a duck is a duck.

Give me a break. Not everybody that disagrees with you is a racist. Landlord that prefer to not have couples with children aren’t racist.

I too am confused how targeting may be illegal under a law that forbids discrimination and discriminating content of ads - I am not familiar with the law. Lack of knowledge/understanding doesn’t make me “racist”.

Some other comments in this inflammatory thread helped me get the point, but your attacks on everybody as racists-by-defaul are deeply bigoted and insulting.

Not by default. After posting a comment supportive of denying the possibility of buying a house based on race and then making up rationalizations for why it's okay. Do you really believe in all of the hundreds of comments from various commentors that not one person here could actually really really in fact be racist?

Thinking about it, people who disagree with me by thinking that it is okay to deny housing based on race is by definition racist, no? The fact is clearly spelled out in law.

I'm not even saying someone disagrees with me. Where do you see that? I stated that there is casual racism in this thread.

I understand there is confusion in the law regarding targeting specifically. But stand back and take a look at the bigger picture of what the technology we create could allow. Like other real self proclaimed proud racists who would only use the service without understanding how it works.

It's not that it's targeting. It's not allowing those your not targeting to be part of the open market.

If you are something, someone calling it out is not an attack or bigotry. Sometimes the truth hurts.

Most people are stating that the responsibility lies within the landlords and not Facebook. There is no disagreement the landlords are being racist.

That link says nothing about targeted ads. It talks about the content of the advertisements.

Mind you, I do think that ads targeted only to e.g. certain races are crappy and probably violate the law, but that certainly isn't as obvious from the links people are providing.

I don't see it as fair. I am not American so I am not familiar with the law. The other comment that replied to me explained why it's also illegal, without accusing anyone of racism.

I still don't believe that merely providing the option to create potentially discriminatory ads is a problem for Facebook, since the same options have perfectly valid usage. It should be the landlord's responsibility to use them correctly.

Why not disable them when it's invalid usage then?

Who did I accuse of racism? I stated people in the thread are being casually racist but didn't name any names.

Haven't we been learning as developers or operators that it's better to put processes and systems in place to prevent human error opposed to relying on human judgement alone? Why the slack with this issue?

How would you detect invalid usage? For example, targeting different text or pictures at different segments should be okay even for housing ads, as long as you don't exclude any segment.

Would you also require natural language processing to detect illegal text?

I'll take a stab. You have a rental house where you want to rent out to senior citizens (for whatever reason). You put your ad in the local AARP magazine. If a young couple stumble upon the ad in the magazine, they can read the ad and apply for your rental.

However, what FB is doing is...that young couple reads the magazine and can't see the ad, but a senior citizen can.

IANAL...and for what it's worth there's a similar lawsuit for age discrimination for job hiring. Post ads only for certain age target.

> young couple ... can't see the ad, but a senior citizen can

Yes. Which is a good thing, because it saves time both to renters and landlords.

It also does not offend anyone, because there is no public age discrimination wording in the ad.

The most important part for our discussion here: there is no public promotion of age superiority in these ads. Therefore this Fair_Housing_Act does NOT apply.

> Which is a good thing, because it saves time both to renters and landlords.

When it comes to protected classes, it's not 'saving time' because a landlord acting legally is equally likely to rent to either group.

Because it's illegal to discriminate on the basis of having kids?

https://www.thebalance.com/fair-housing-act-violation-179889...

I think they're saying that the tool may have been used like this:

1) Create an ad targeting straight couples, and hide it from gay couples. 2) Create an ad targeting gay couples, and hide it from straight couples.

If you query for "is anyone running an ad hidden from gay couples", this would return "yes".

However, my hunch (hope?) is that the prosecution was clever enough to account for this, and are specifically finding ad campaigns which are "unbalanced" (eg; there is no ad targeting group X).

Sounds reminiscent of the separate but equal argument

It seems rather easy to solve to me.

Are the adds structured to exclude certain groups from certain properties: Problem

Are the adds structured to engage each group as much as possible: No problem.

There might be some grey area where you decide not to market certain properties to certain groups, because you think they aren't interested rather then because you don't want them.

I have kids and am of Muslim origin and I have absolutely no problem with this:

> _not_ to show ads to "undesireable" people, like people with kids, or of a certain religion

What if I have a bar in Vegas almost exclusively frequented by young people in their twenties who go their to get drunk and meet singles. Why would I want to waste money showing an ad to people with kids who will not be interested and bring way less conversions than people with no kids in their twenties? What if I open a delicatessen shop that makes most of its business on porc meat and liquor, would I get a lot of conversions by paying to show such an ad to Muslims or would I be wasting money? What you want is advertisers to show their ads to people who are not interested and lose their money. That doesn't seem fair to me. People of different family situation (kids or no kids) or religions don't always share the same interests and that's ok.

That's totally fine; the law only cares about specific markets of life-altering importance like housing, employment, and probably a couple of others that I can't think of off the top of my head.

This isn’t a blanket law against everything. Your bar ad for twenty-somethings for example is perfectly fine and exactly what everyone would do.

I think the bigger problem, that you haven't addressed here, is the ongoing prevalence of the word "creative" used as a noun.

"creative" used as a noun is perfectly standard inside the advertising industry.

While true, I’ll admit to chuckling a bit.

There are specific laws about how you can advertise real estate for sale or rent. Every real estate agent and landlord knows the rules.

https://www.thebalance.com/fair-housing-act-violation-179889...

That is an interesting point, kind of on the edge I guess. If Facebook really wanted to do the right thing while allowing this kind of multi-targeting, they should then build something such as segments in the same campaign.

You want to target only a specific group that, under the law, can't be targeted/avoided? Fine, but then you have to create at least 3 segments on this ad to target at least 3 different groups, to prove that you are not discriminating.

A segment would be a version of the ad (design, copy, etc) + targeted group.

edit: my point here is that it should be Facebook's responsibility to make it difficult for publisher to post illegal ads, not the other way around.

Here's the ProPublica stories that led to this

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

https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-disc...

ProPublica really did an amazing job of sticking with this, considering that HUD knew what was happening and still dropped the investigation in 2016.

HUD Secretary at the time was Julian Castro.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Castro

Doing a quick scan of his wiki I don’t see anything relevant? Or are you trying to imply something in particular and I just missed it?

Simply pointing out the leader of the department at fault. In my humble opinion, this is useful for holding bad government actors responsible.

ProPublica does some really good investigative reporting. They are the first ones on the scene with high quality reporting on a lot of current issues. I have donated to them in the past.

How did they not see this coming. Are they not familiar with another dotcom called Craigslist who had to deal with this very same regulation years ago. Their counsel either wasn't aware of what FB marketplace was doing or didn't know about FHA laws.

> draw a red line around zip codes and then not display ads to Facebook users who live in specific zip codes.

This alone is really damn damning. I'm going to go out on a limb and say their counsel is really young and didn't know this was a problem. There is a lot of history in that sentence alone.

I’m sure their counsel knows exactly what they’re doing. Sometimes when you’re big and bad enough it’s worth it to take a gamble and see how things will settle in court.

And that’s not even necessarily a bad thing. People and cultures change and so should our regulation and laws.

> And that’s not even necessarily a bad thing.

...what? Are you suggesting it's a good thing that we bring back red lining and other discriminatory practices?

Reading charitably, perhaps they meant: it was bad in the case, but it isn't always a bad thing.

If you dont show someone an ad, that's not discrimination. It's just not advertising to a group of people.

It's a form of discrimination though admittedly not the most egregious form of discrimination. The HUD has explicit regulations and guidelines involving "Selective use of advertising media or content" and "Selective geographic advertisements".

The legal threshold for discrimination is set a lot lower for housing than it is in other scenarios For good reason too -- the consequences of discriminated, for example, at a coffee shop are far less impactful than being discriminated for what housing you can find and obtain.

> ...what? Are you suggesting it's a good thing that we bring back red lining and other discriminatory practices?

Putting words into people's mouths like that is incredibly rude, and dishonest.

That might be phrased stridently but it's not 'putting words into someone's mouth'. It's a question.

I think OP could have found a better way to word it which wouldn’t seem so hostile and accusatory, if they spent another few seconds before clicking ‘reply’.

I think there's something in the guidelines about how if you're going to yell at someone for being rude, you should take care to give them the most charitable and accurate yelling possible.

I don't think that's what's being suggested. The idea that redlining should be reexamined by the courts every half century or so is what's being suggested. In 2018, courts ought to find its still illegal give facebook a book fine. In 2118? Hopefully we'll be past racism and courts will find the concept obsolete and antiquated. Or they may find racism is common but the tools needed to manage it are different.

The Internet has a great search for secret closet racists, but they're pretty rare. For the most part, it makes sense to give people the benefit of the doubt.

Having been in a mixed-race relationship where one partner is brown, I can tell you firsthandedly that if you think racism is rare, then you’re probably white or Asian or you have consistently lived in areas where racism is actually rare. I lived in places where when I was young, I never saw anyone engage in racist behaviors. This changed the moment I entered that relationship. It may have ended long ago, but it’s definitely made me more aware of the subtle ways that people show prejudice when it’s not outright. Is it a majority? No. At least one in ten? Much closer to reality. We’ve got a long way to go, even still. Don’t forget that schools were still segregated in America less than a century ago — there are leaders in government and industry that grew up in that environment. You’ve got at least two generations to die off before we can really say that the impacts of that era are negligible.

if you think racism is rare, then you’re probably white or Asian

I sincerely hope this isn't an intimation that Asians are somehow immune from forms of racism or racially charged behavior?

Would you be able to clarify this a bit? Maybe I've misunderstood you.

Definitely not the implication. Everyone can receive racially charged behavior, however the outright hostility towards lighter-skinned Asians in the United States is significantly lower than towards other minority groups as well as darker-skinned Asians.

Fair enough.

Consider me a bit incredulous of that argument.

I guess, as a man of color I'm hesitant to create some sort of ranking system as to "who's getting whipped harder" as a metric when it comes to racial discrimination of all its permutations.

And there are still plenty of places in south where people think "miscgenenation" is a sin.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/12/interracial-marria...

How do you think Uber and Airbnb became legal?

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I cannot conceive of a "stronger" explanation for what the GP stated. What kind of good faith argument could possibly be assumed in that guy asking that maybe reexamining Redline laws isn't the worst thing. It's a vile thing to say, and a statement made, I can only assume, in utter and wanton disregard of racial history of the United States.

It's a bit shameful that you flagged the parent and not the grandparent, who seems to be playing devil's advocate purely for the sake of an argument.

It's very clear what they were saying, is that if one follows the law at all time there is no chance that a bad thing will "accidentally" happen.

You are actually the one violating that policy.

Down the the literal words "red line"[0]. For, I suppose young or otherwise ignorant people, here:

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

Wow this is a despicable practice, thanks for sharing.

And its effects are still in place today. Look at Baltimore, superimpose the old redlines on, and look at property values/average income.

The "red line" wording is from the HUD press release. I don't think there is any red line in the Facebook UI, you input a list of zip codes. (https://www.facebook.com/business/help/community/question/?i...)

Not true. I was able to draw actual red lines excluding zip codes from seeing a housing ad. But this was 8-10 months ago. It’s possible they changed the UI.

Was Legal just sleeping at the wheel? This is a very well known piece of history.

I wonder how this conversation went when they were drawing up this feature.

Not preventing people from doing something illegal is not itself illegal?

That's not the legal test to determine if someone is afoul of the legal test that Facebook is accused of violating.

The wording of the provision they've run afoul of is elsewhere in the thread; it disagrees with you.

My point is more along the lines of Legal needed to be asleep at the wheel to let a team put together a solution where you literally draw a red line around zip codes to exclude them.

That’s bs. FB makes inferences about and collects info from people then uses it against those same people by allowing exclusions from ads.

Facebook is actively publishing these advertisements. They are breaking the law - that they do it on the behalf of someone else is no excuse.

No one at FB cares about anything. They bet (and have been right) that they can pay off whomever (“lobby”) so they can keep making $. This will result in nothing more than a little monetary fine and removal of one or two specific “features.” It’s just whack-a-mole.

> This is a very well known piece of history.

In a company where you have people defacing "black lives matter" posters why is it surprising that they know fuck all about black history?

How did they not see this coming. Are they not familiar with another dotcom called Craigslist who had to deal with this very same regulation years ago.

I guess "move fast and break things" applies both to code and the law.

> draw a red line around zip codes and then not display ads to Facebook users who live in specific zip codes.

This is actually somewhat odd in this context. Obviously if you're advertising housing in Boston you don't want to be advertising it to people in Washington or China, or probably even Springfield. So you need some way to specify a set of regions and zip code is the obvious way of doing that.

No, specifying individual zip codes sounds like the worst way to do that. The obvious way is to have a max distance slider.

Except that that doesn't work when you're advertising housing in Florida and you want to advertise to people in the Northeast who want to retire somewhere warm but not people in the South who already live somewhere warm.

It is almost as if we have geographic areas larger than zip codes such as cities, states, regions, that can be targeted without running afoul of laws about targeted advertising of real estate.

If you exclude all of Oakland specifically because it's full of minorities, you're discriminating based on race. If you exclude one tiny neighborhood because it's on the other side of a mountain and is physically a part of a different area than it's administratively a part of, you aren't. Granularity isn't the problem.

And state or regional real estate advertising doesn't work because basically nobody in San Francisco is looking for housing in Los Angeles or vice versa, much less San Francisco and Phoenix.

That's far less precise. As the crow flies is often not a very good indicator of potential customer base. National borders, rivers, transit design, competitor locations, etc can all mean that you might find yourself serving plenty of people 20km away in one direction but practically none 5km in the other.

It can get much more granular than that. E.g. you may not want people living in certain neighborhoods to see your property listing.

Man, I wish I could be so optimistic to think they just didn't know any better.

Perhaps they did, but figured that on the balance, the profit will outweigh the penalty.

Here are the likely relevant laws in question:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Housing_Act

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964

By law you cannot discriminate by any designation of protected class, which includes not only parties to a business transaction but also messaging and opportunities there upon.

I do understand why Facebook would allow ad display filtering by race and other demographic categorizations since they are a media organization who sells advertising. Whether or not that practice is morally qualified or agreeable it makes sense from a business perspective (oh how I do detest advertising).

What I don't get is why Facebook would allow ad suppliers the option to set values to these filters. Facebook has the data to make optimal demographic determinations for a geographically centered business market. Perhaps this indicates that either Facebook isn't very good at that or that ad supplies prefer to perform their own independent research out of distrust or lack of availability from Facebook.

Anyway, this does look like a valid complaint. I wouldn't just sue Facebook though. I would also seek for discovery of the ad suppliers and sue them as well. Facebook is just the proxy here. Somebody is making a deliberate determination to racial profile in violation of the spirit of the law.

---

EDIT. See the third bullet point here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1968#Types...

My question would be if an advertiser advertised housing in a demographically targeted publication, for example, a publication focused only on single gay men, if that would necessarily function as discrimination since single mothers wouldn’t be reading that publication, nor those ads. Facebook allows demographic targeting that just happens to be more “effective,” but no more discriminatory that the way conventional targeted “offline” advertising works now. Advertising housing in a newsletter for Jewish people, does that not result in discrimination against non Jews since they wouldn’t see that ad? It seems that as long as the housing and the ad content itself weren’t discriminatory, the law would seem to be upheld. What this suit seems to be saying is that you are obligated to advertise your housing where every protected group would have an equal chance of seeing the ad, anything less would be discriminatory right? The very slippery slope is that housing ads themselves could only appear in official, government publications otherwise some group or another would be discriminated against since they wouldn’t normally see the ad.

I find those to be distinctly different qualities even if the end result is similar. The distinguishing factor is: Who is performing the discrimination?

In one example the discrimination is deliberately performed by an ad supplier. In the other example the discrimination is performed by the audience of the offline publication. I come to this conclusion because it is the audience that is choosing which demographically targeted publications to purchase or read. People cannot legally discriminate against themselves.

That distinction is also a paradox for Facebook. You cannot be a supplier to everybody and simultaneously to a targeted individual as chosen by individual's inputs. Facebook tries to have both sides of a coin by allowing users maximum flexibility in content preferences and also provide that power to ad suppliers to use for precision targeting.

I also assume that the further you get from overt discrimination based on a protected class the less issue you’re likely to run into. After all, ads on sites or magazines have to be selectively run and each site or magazine has some demographic.

Added: HUD lists some advertising practices that it prohibits but obviously the smaller the scale and the grayer the intent, the less likely a complaint.

In the example, the building owner/manager isn't randomly choosing a publication to put their ad in. They are acting to discriminate against people that don't (or are merely highly unlikely to) read the magazine.

So? Are the ads in the selected publication forcefully shown to a person otherwise not choosing to read the publication or forcefully denied from a person choosing to read the publication?

Discrimination, in this regard, only occurs if somebody is made to consume or is denied content on the basis of a protected class status.

So you didn't really address it in that sense in your other comment.

I guess I don't see how ad targeting involves force either (it just happens to be effective), but whatever.

> It seems that as long as the housing and the ad content itself weren’t discriminatory, the law would seem to be upheld.

That's not the issue. The issue is the application of demographics filters. While most publications have a self-selecting audience, the publications themselves do not apply those kind of filters, especially with regard to showing advertising content to a subset of readers.

As you point out, Facebook targeting is not anything qualitatively new; it's the same old tools, just cheaper and more fine-grained. And the law was written to prevent those same tools from being used to discriminate.

According to Code of Federal Regulations 109, for example, your hypothetical would indeed be discriminatory (https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/DOC_7781.PDF, search for "Selective use of advertising media or content")

Quoting the relevant section:

> The following are examples of the selective use of advertisements which may be discriminatory:

(The rest refer to selective use of the "equal opportunity" slogan and logo, and to selective choice of human models to e.g. exclude children in housing ads.)

If a housing provider has a policy of only advertising in targeted publications, that is an issue. Same goes if it only holds for a subset of their offering (e.g. only for 'jewish neighborhoods'). However, if there is a decent enough effort to also advertise in widely read publications, there doesn't seem to be an issue.

I would say, using targeted publications 'in addition' is not an issue, but using them as the 'main avenue' is an issue.

Of course Facebook should allow racial filtering. Not understanding this is a fundamental failure to understand minority businesses. Let's say hypothetically you're selling a product that is highly ethnically selected, like beauty products (before any criticism keep in mind that the first self made American female millionaire, cj walker made her fortune on beauty products) - should you be forced to buy advertising impressions for the majority that has no use for your product? Basically this would create a huge disadvantage/drag to minority entrepreneurs seeking to capitalize on a niche market and grow.

Except that’s literally illegal in housing.

Yes it makes sense in other contexts, but it should never have been allowed here.

I’m surprised it took this long for them to be sued. Just like job notices they’ve been allowing blatantly illegal ads for a LONG time.

I’m surprised it took this long for them to be sued.

With people like Bosworth and Zuckerberg at the top and Sandberg as consigliere it's no surprise at all. Tone at the top has a huge effect on internal controls.

I’d agree but it’s the corporate counsel’s job to make sure they know about this stuff. Did counsel never tell them ‘you MUST do something about this’, which seems like a huge failing, or has it been brought up and the executives decide ‘oh well we don’t care’ which would be a REALLY BAD thing to have a court find out about.

This is all so easy to avoid. Maybe you’d get sued when someone claimed you weren’t doing enough but they’re not doing ANYTHING. The lowest possible bar.

If there are good reasons why one ethnicity would prefer housing over another (or, equivalently, if the housing provider would prefer them) then it's just like the beauty products thing and discrimination in advertising should be allowed. And if there aren't then it's hardly worth the time to ban it-- anyone who engaged in it would be wasting their time.

So although it seems unclear whether that conditional is met, either way I don't see why we would ban such advertising.

> If there are good reasons why ... the housing provider would prefer them

Housing is a neccesity in life. Therefore, discrimination by housing providers is a real problem. Being excluded from parts of the housing market is very different from being excluded from parts of the beauty market. Even more so because housing viable for e.g. white people is equally viable for black people. Whereas the same does not hold for beauty products.

Now, if indeed the other case were to occur (where one ethnicity is not interested in certain housing, and advertising reflects this) that would be less obviously bad. However, like I stated it seems less likely that this would occur. Moreover, this is a very convenient cover for people who do wish to discriminate.

Of course Facebook should allow racial filtering. Not understanding this is a fundamental failure to understand minority businesses.

This isn't about makeup, or placing ads in a targeted magazine like Ebony. It's about real estate and housing, and the laws governing that kind of advertising are well-established and very clear.

I worked briefly in large multi-unit housing, and got some of the training related to this sort of thing (though not specifically to advertising).

We were taught that if you're showing an apartment building to someone, you can't ask their age. You can't ask if they have children. You can't ask if they're pregnant.

You can't even do seemingly innocent things like ask a woman who is pregnant or visiting with children if she'd prefer a unit near the playground. Or suggest a ground-floor unit to a person in a wheelchair, even if the building doesn't have an elevator.

Maybe it was just this company's lawyer's overreactions to the law, or perhaps the company had previous bad experiences in this area. But we were given dozens of similar scenarios and those who answered even one incorrectly had to go through enhanced training.

Parent post asked the question in general, not specific to housing.

Incorrect. The parent cited housing law quite specifically. The first link at the top of the comment has the word "housing" right in the title.

> I do understand why Facebook would allow ad display filtering by race and other demographic categorizations since they are a media organization who sells advertising. Whether or not that practice is morally qualified or agreeable it makes sense from a business perspective (oh how I do detest advertising).

That's them agreeing with you that it's not illegal in the general case, and makes sense, even.

But the very start of the post says it's illegal for housing.

Nobody is arguing legality. I'm making a moral (not business) argument for allowing discrimination in the general case, on the grounds that disallowing discrimination disadvantages minority entrepreneurs.

I agree with you that a black female should not have to pay to send ads to a white male for her hair weave products. FB should allow this level of segmentation and discrimination based on race for both moral and business reasons.

Housing is a regulated industry where discrimination in certain ways is not allowed. The idea is allegedly that a room is a room and a tenant is a tenant, regardless of race or age or etc. The government has decreed that housing is too important of a consumer item to allow landlords to police themselves.

Unfortunately, many landlords find ways to skirt the law.

And in the case of sub-leasing and finding roommates, discrimination is totally legal. I can make a post saying "female only". Additionally, upon an in person meeting, I can even turn away a roommate who is female but isn't Asian for example.

No, dnautics is correct. I phrased the racial profiling subject irrespective of the housing subject even though I did post links related to real estate anti-discrimination.

When I wrote the comment I wasn't thinking of retail consumer goods. Strictly in the context of geographic markets my comment was more valid, but in the context of beauty products (as the provided example) it doesn't make any sense.

Seems to me that the courts and the public are becoming much less tolerant of companies operating on Google scale, where most things are decided by algorithms and a human never sees it at all. This might serve as an upper bound on the size of future companies: if you might have liability for every single ad or comment you let someone post, you’re going to want human review of all that content.

What about this complaint would prevent Facebook from addressing it without humans involved? All they're going to do is revoke microtargeting abilities from housing ads.

How do they determine what's a housing ad?

There's two pieces to this a) Facebook makes this possible and b) Facebook damns themselves and promotes that they make this possible for housing. Part b is easy to fix: make it harder to do housing ads that are targeted. However, part a is much harder: what stops me from advertising my AirBnb listing as a URL on Facebook as a "generic ad"?

> what stops me from advertising my AirBnb listing as a URL on Facebook as a "generic ad"?

By not permitting Airbnb URLs as generic ads.

Edit to ad: and placing a warning if it looks like it might be a housing ad: “this looks like a housing related ad and has been flagged for moderation”

"How do they determine what's a housing ad?"

You ask the user to say what type of ad it is, under penalty of violation of contract, and contractually obligate them to carry the legal risk if they lie.

There's no requirement that it be done via some fancy ML algorithm. I would expect that unless FB actively attempts to piss off the government, that would pass legal muster. Goodness knows I've signed enough agreements where I've agreed to very similar clauses just in normal day-to-day life.

I’m afraid that the law being used to accuse Facebook would apply in that case too.

Are you saying that as a lawyer who is aware of this area of law, or are you saying that as a random internet person? I'd be more than a little surprised if your guess is correct. Normally, in my understanding, if one makes a good faith attempt to follow the law, one is normally in the clear. One does not become culpable when one's efforts to comply are stymied by fraud on the part of a third party.

Then again, I'm just a random internet person. If you're a lawyer, or if you can provide chapter and verse, I'll shut up.

> contractually obligate them to carry the legal risk if they lie

The government is under no obligation to look at the terms of a civil contract when they decide who to prosecute.

Furthermore, Facebook has already tried this. After the first ProPublica article (last year, I think) they added a “I’m not breaking the law” checkbox.

How do they determine what's a housing ad?

The same way that newspapers, television stations, radio stations, magazines, and advertising agencies have for the last 200 or so years.

And they didn't have super-duper AI, the smartest people on the continent, and warehouses full of servers to help.

How do they determine what's a housing ad?

By doing it.

Facebook loves to try to play both sides, and claim to paying customers that it absolutely has the ability to do a thing, while turning round and saying to regulators that it is only a poor helpless social-media network utterly lacking in the ability to do such things.

If even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the capabilities Facebook claims in its materials for advertisers are genuine, it can figure out which ads are housing ads.

Have heavy fines in the TOS (communicated upfront) about illegal adds. This gives FB an incentive to police themselves, and lets the bad-actors pay for the enforcement.

On the other hand, this doesn't seem like an issue of algorithms at all.

I was reading the list you edited out and I was like "yeah I don't want to live next to any of those", I wish there was app for doing the reverse about your neighbors before you rent a place. Then I felt bad for thinking that thought.

For what it's worth, I edited it out because I couldn't figure out the formatting!

I think you’ve piqued everyone’s curiosity now.

It was just the list of offenses mentioned in the article.

I think that the public and the courts are correctly recognizing that the excuse that a human never sees something doesn't exempt an organization of the regulatory burden borne by companies where the work is done proportionally more by humans.

If Facebook, Google, et. al want to run advertising companies they have to properly conduct themselves in the current regulatory environment, if their competitive advantage really just boils down to the fact that they are ignoring the rules then there should be a market correction based on them being subject to actual enforcement.

(This is separate from how anyone feels about the actual rules, I think it is reasonable to say that everyone should agree that if there are rules they should be universally applied.)

>I think it is reasonable to say that everyone should agree that if there are rules they should be universally applied

What happens if the rules are bad rules? E.g. if it's illegal for Facebook to allow advertisements for marijuana dispensaries on a federal level? Clearly that's not something we'd want to see universally applied.

What exactly is your argument? That if there's a bad law on the books, we shouldn't have laws?

My argument is just that not all laws are good, and following the law does not equate to doing the right thing.

And they’re free to take that position and face the consequences.

Whilst that is totally correct morally, law enforcement must be very careful about applying that. There is a trade-off between having a stable and predictable set of laws (i.e. strict enforcement) and having room for judgement calls when the letter of the law is unfair (i.e. discretion in enforcement).

I understand when regulators decide to side with strict enforcement when a companies only advantage comes from not following the rules. Especially when it is disputed the rules shouldn't be there.

Or perhaps that if the law is bad, we should engage in civil disobedience.

Giant multinational corporations are squarely last in the "queue of parties that ought to commit civil disobedience."

Only if you start with the assumption that everything to do with them is evil. At the end of the day, they still employ and support thousands of people. There certainly are many cases in which they do the wrong thing, but their power for good should also be embraced.

I agree in this case, but I’d disagree if it were Apple refusing to unlock iPhones for authorities, so I’m not sure I can agree this is universal.

Yes, Facebook should commit civil disobedience by explicitly allowing housing ads to not be shown to black people. Great plan.

I think that if it were the consensus view of Americans that dispensaries should not be permitted to advertise then such a regulation is ok.

I think that if corporation wants to engage in a form of civil disobedience then that act should be recognized and treated by the authorities appropriately, not treated like it is not happening in the first place. The point of an act of civil disobedience is that it has consequences that you are willing to withstand to serve the greater good, just getting away with something is not the same thing.

> , if their competitive advantage really just boils down to the fact that they are ignoring the rules then there should be a market correction based on them being subject to actual enforcement.

I highly doubt that the majority of advertising business for Facebook and Google comes solely from discriminatory housing ads.

I also doubt that it is a majority of their business, but I think it would be interesting to find out just how much of their revenue is represented by discriminatory advertising across many domains (housing, hiring, for example), political advertising that may be dubious or illegal, and outright solicitation for scams. And then to think about how their revenue would fall and their costs increase if they are obligated to make a sincere effort to eliminate these items from their portfolio.

The problem here is that this is the exact opposite of what's going on - the competitive advantage of many smaller companies these days is that they are not even close to being compliant with regulations but platforms often tolerate them because they are not responsible for counterparty compliance.

If you do however put that onus on the platforms, then it's entirely predictable that platforms will cut ties with small businesses. This is more or less what happened with GDPR - lots of small ad-tech players became large liabilities for others in the value chain, leading to more consolidation in the industry. Outside of technology, it's common for certain types of services or tools not to be made aware to small-time customers. The technology industry at large and the large tech companies in particular have so far bucked this trend in a way that created a huge amount of value for the world at large, but this doesn't have to be this way.

In this case who are the smaller companies you are referring to specifically?

If the small companies in question are gaining competitive advantage through non-compliance that makes them viable enterprises then it is good and correct that they should be forced to change their business model and compete with the same rules as everyone else, right?

I don't understand what you are saying with this: "Outside of technology, it's common for certain types of services or tools not to be made aware to small-time customers. The technology industry at large and the large tech companies in particular have so far bucked this trend in a way that created a huge amount of value for the world at large.."

This is a very easy thing to avoid though:

if (ad target == anything to do with housing) {disable options to exclude ethnic affinity [and a bunch of other things]}

It's not that easy, because there are many proxies that correlate with protected categories. For instance, take a look at the greater DC area with census data on race. You can easily target regions without explicitly using race.

Compliance.

If they lock down microtargetting for housing related ads and have some code to flag housing ads posted in different categories they become compliant with the law. Nobody says they have to be 100% perfect to be compliment.

Sure, but if you think the law serves a purpose, then one may ask whether being technically compliant is success.

It's a start. They weren't even doing that.

Your use of the phrase "it's a start" suggests that further restrictions will follow.

No, it implies that they at least appeared to be trying, even if it wasn’t very effective.

As it is they don’t seem to have put in the smallest possible effort to comply and decided to ignore the law completely.

Is it more important that they "appear[] to be trying" than that the policy imposed on them actually achieve the ostensible policy goal?

For their legal case? I’d think so. It looks way better that you were trying to do something and weren’t very effective than that you decided not to bother.

For their need to comply? No. They have to follow ineffective laws as long as they’re on the books.

Where did people jump to the conclusion that following the law is incompatible with the goal of the law? Saying that it might be insufficient is a different matter.

You're responding to me as though I was providing Facebook's defense for not complying. I wasn't. I was saying that if Facebook technically complies, that isn't necessarily sufficient.

"if you think the law serves a purpose" Surely it is not controversial here to suggest that anti-discrimination laws serve a purpose and therefore if someone finds a loophole that does not mean it is just fine?

I was just reading in Jalopnik about how Toyota added reinforcement to their minivan to deal with small offset driver's side impacts, and then when a test for a similar passenger side impact was done, surprise surprise, there was no symmetric reinforcement on that side!

It's not that easy

If a small town newspaper with a staff of 30 can do it, Facebook has both the staff and resources to do the same.

If it cannot, or will not, it should not take advertisements for sectors that are regulated.

But small town newspapers are endangered by those costs! Facebook only makes about $6 ARPU. Automating the crap out of everything is what enables them to exist.

cry me a fucking river, Facebook.

Then it can't exist. Worse things could befall the world.

Elaborating a bit on the sibling comments, Facebook has no "right" to exist as a business. If the only reason it can exist is by ignoring laws with which other businesses are able to comply, it should be shut down (or alternately, forced to obey those laws and then "corrected" out of business by the market).

>Automating the crap out of everything is what enables them to exist.

If they're too big to be accountable then maybe they shouldn't exist.

Companies operating on Google scale should also have the scale to ensure that their ad platform doesn't enable people to target ads discriminately, especially when it's on something like housing where there are laws against that. They're probably more worried about their quarterly results and shareholders than they are about potential problems until it becomes a big problem.

Let this be a lesson to all shareholders that they should pressure companies to operate lawfully and that companies have a fiduciary duty to them to obey laws.

Right, except what does scale had to do with anything? The law is there regardless of the scale.

Scale is what gives these companies some cover from "not having human review". Not having human review is what made the scale possible.

Old and irrelevant laws have always been dampeners on company growth. Hopefully a Chinese Company might come up with a classifieds website that US citizens will be able to use.

last company i worked at we built a PaaS for banks and credit unions that handled mortgage applications.

you wouldn't believe how much time, effort, institutional knowledge, and expertise we applied to regulatory auditing, reporting requirements, and fraud detection per federal guidelines.

we were less than 80 employees total.

hardly a burden for the likes of google.

I think you're conflating two unrelated dimensions - automation and size. Traditional ad-buying for TV operates at scale but without much automation. Meanwhile, there are plenty of players in the ad business that aren't particularly large but operate without much human oversight.

What this does is increasing the cost of serving small customers, while having negligible impact on the cost of serving large customers. This likely means companies like Google and Facebook will stop serving small businesses that cannot guarantee a certain budget. In a way, we live in a fairly rare time in that a small startup has access to AWS, Azure, GCP, FB ad manager and Google adwords, getting access to most of the same functionalities afforded to larger companies, while operating on tiny budgets without needing account management. This isn't true of many other industries or even services within the same industries. As is, I don't think small businesses are particularly profitable segments for these companies.

This is exactly what already happened with Youtube demonetization - the increased scrutiny on content safety and importance of having human content auditors made monetizing large groups of small-time publishers on Youtube entirely uneconomical for Google. So they got the boot. So in a sense, we should conclude the exact opposite here - automation is what allows a level-playing field for small players and if you take it away through putting a huge amount of pressure on platforms to police behavior of individual customers, it will accelerate consolidation in other industries.

So if I get a radio license and then broadcast an illegal ad, it's the FCC's fault.

Why is everyone trying so hard to turn facebook (and google, twitter, etc...) into a filter on everything we say?

When facebook gets held responsible for all content in all jurisdiction it will err on the side of proscription. It was only about 10 years ago that many now acceptable (mandatory even) progressive positions were not in favor.

It won't be another day or two before there is another article bemoaning google acquiescing to China. Pick one. I'll take the one that is open, the crazies broadcast their fake news and we have the occasional illegal ad.

By the way, if these ads are illegal and conducted through facebook, how easy is it for the FHA to look up who is responsible and go after them. Their whole job is done for them. Going after Facebook is sensational and feels good I guess.

this is a consequence of facebook owning the network (on purpose obviously), as opposed to something like the web or the air which is not centrally owned. yay capitalism!

Facebook is the publisher of the ads and is responsible for obeying the law.

If someone asks Facebook to publish an illegal ad, Facebook should not do it.

This is not a free speech issue, or a political speech issue. Nobody is censoring progressive or conservative positions in this case. It's an issue of legality in real estate advertising under a framework of laws that were written decades ago.

The problem is: These kind of censorship of use generated content can't scale up to all jurisdiction.

Maybe we should acknowledge it is impossible to make a global, legal, Facebook-like website.

Why would we do that? We haven't been able to stop merchants swindling customers since the invention of trade, but we don't throw up our hands and shut down all markets. We just do the best we can to keep things as upright as possible.

Society doesn't have to accommodate Facebook's need to scale their businesses. If Facebook is unable to comply with a jurisdiction's laws then it shouldn't do business in that jurisdiction.

If Facebook makes money on it they have the funds to stop it.

No slippery slope. This shit is illegal and has been for decades . Just because it happens on the internet doesn't make it any less illegal.

We're not talking about someone singing up for a free account with a burner email and posting on a Facebook group. We're talking about Facebook's ad targeting product from which they make a substantial profit...

It's not even the censorship of user generated content.

Facebook allows you to exclude housing ads from being shown to protected classes of people. Facebook effectively says "Do you want to hide this ad from disabled people?" All they have to do to comply with anti-discrimination laws is to not offer this kind of exclusion.

> So if I get a radio license and then broadcast an illegal ad, it's the FCC's fault.

How is Facebook the FCC and not the broadcaster in this metaphor?

there needs to be a dmca for ads.

What does that mean? Who's copying ads?

Your metaphor is broken: It's more like if you own a radio station, and play user-contributed ads, you are liable for the illegal ads.

It's not a very good metaphor, because no radio station simply publishes user-contributed content.

It's a strictly incorrect metaphor. Radio stations aren't liable in this scenario. Neither are newspapers with illegal personal ads for discriminatory housing.

There's no way they can be liable because they can't know if the ads are illegal or not. The legality of a given ad depends on many factors not always present in the ad itself -- such as whether the landlord lives in one of the units. All of the above selection criteria are perfectly OK to filter by if a landlord occupies a unit in a building with less than 4 units.

This is why it's legal to advertise for particular genders in a shared apartment scenario. It's also legal to advertise for other criteria like race in these cases -- though it's not socially acceptable.

It's impossible for Facebook to know whether a given ad is legal because of these hidden criteria.

>Neither are newspapers with illegal personal ads for discriminatory housing.

Yes they are!

The FHA specifically applies to housing ads!

>The legality of a given ad depends on many factors not always present in the ad itself -- such as whether the landlord lives in one of the units. All of the above selection criteria are perfectly OK to filter by if a landlord occupies a unit in a building with less than 4 units.

No, discriminatory ads are illegal (other than sex in a roommate situation) even though discrimination in selection is legal in some cases.

>It's also legal to advertise for other criteria like race in these cases -- though it's not socially acceptable

No, it's not legal.

If you post a housing ad on Craigslist, they tell you all this.

https://www.craigslist.org/about/FHA

> Yes they are!

No, they are not.

> The FHA specifically applies to housing ads!

As I explained, the FHA applies to certain /kinds/ of housing ads. The determination of whether the FHA applies at all is dependent on a multitude of factors which an advertising middle-man cannot easily know.

Some advertisers opt to respond by applying broad content bans, but this is not reflective of the underlying law.

You will not develop an accurate understanding of the law by trying to reverse engineer it through reading various corporate policies.

> No, discriminatory ads are illegal (other than sex in a roommate situation) even though discrimination in selection is legal in some cases.

This is flatly incorrect. There is no differentiation whatsoever in the FHA between different types of discrimination. They are all uniformly referenced and exempted. See 42 U.S. Code § 3604 Sec 804.

The exemptions mean the FHA restrictions do not apply at all. Nowhere is gender discrimination carved out differently from any other type.

> No, it's not legal.

Yeah, it is. I don't like it any more than you do, but this is a fact not a preference.

You are making a common error by ascribing common sense and reasonability to the law. Sometimes this can help frame broad tenets but in this particular case it is leading you to a demonstrably false conclusion.

No, if you get a radio license and so something illegal with it, that's your fault, and the FCC is the authority that can punish you for it.

In this case, just like Facebook.

Your responsibility, handed to you with the license, is to not do illegal things, even if people want to pay you money to do it. It's especially bad if you build an automated system that has options for people to do illegal things, since you are in charge of that. The FCC may or may not go after the people who bought the illegal-thing-service from you, but they will definitely go after you.

And the correct solution is to not have the options open in the first place. "Would you like to place an ad? Is it for real estate or housing in any way? OK, the following advertising options are open to you, but others have been turned off in order to comply with the law."

I'm not sure I agree. If someone buys a radio to transmit illegally, the advertising platform they viewed the ad for the radio on isn't liable, nor is the place they bought it from, nor is the manufacturer or importer. (There is quite the controversy around people buying Baofeng radios to transmit illegally. Amazon is happy to sell you one, no questions asked.)

This extends to many areas. Gun manufacturers aren't liable when someone goes on a shooting spree with a gun, for example.

I feel like this is a slippery slope. Facebook lets anyone advertise anything, and gives everyone the same targeting tools. If you use them illegally, that should be on you, not on Facebook. Just like how you can use a screwdriver to screw in screws, or to go around stabbing people with it. The difference is that screwdrivers are a well-understood tool, whereas ad targeting tools are new and scary.

If you want to make advertising illegal, I'm fine with that, but good luck.

I can agree with you if the ad network publishes a transparency report that is publicly available and includes all ad activity on its network. I doubt anyone will agree to this. They'll cite privacy and security and blah blah.

Just to be clear, we're talking about targeted advertising. I don't know how we can fix this issue. Maybe Facebook can ask tell type of an ad something is?

How about: it’s the responsibility of people posting ads on Facebook to follow the laws that apply to them.

I don’t see why it’s Facebook’s responsibility to police advertising for housing and control how it’s targeted. If advertisers use illegal targeting then that should be on them.

The people publishing these ads are literally paying Facebook to do so. IANAL but as far as I know it's not legal to profit off illegal activity. Facebook are, themselves, breaking the law here.

What law specifically makes it illegal "to profit off illegal activity"?

That sounds incredibly broad and impossible to to avoid.

I imagine you'd be considered an accessory to the act in question. There are also laws like this [1], although they don't apply to this situation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_Sam_law

Why does it always have to be either-or. Can't we all agree that Facebook also has some responsibility to prevent abuse? I'm not saying they have to make sure no one can ever break a law using their platform. But once they become aware people are abusing it to do so, how can you say it's fine for them to ignore it. This seems to be the case, as far as i understand that filing. That's how you end with government having to impose regulation. I'd prefer Facebook willingly work with law enforcement or/and their clients to make sure forced intervention won't be necessary.

Exactly, whichever is most effective. The aim of the law is primarily to protect against descrimination, not to blame a certain party. Both the publishers and the buyers are at fault but whichever changes get the problem fixed seems the best way to go.

Getting Facebook to disable some targeting option seems like a much easier route than going after each ad buyer. Targeting the publisher makes sense because they are in the best position to enforce policies on their platform and stop the descriminatory practice at a larger scale.

but it's not really what's happening here. If a gun manufacturer sells you a gun where it is legal to sell gun, then they are neither doing something illegal, nor directly giving you tools to do something illegal. They can't control what you will do with the gun, but they also don't tell you where it's safe to go kill people with it, and mostly give you safety instructions.

Here it is the same thing with Facebook. If they sell you a platform for advertising, they might not be able to control 100% of the content of the ads, some bad stuff might slip. But they should NOT offer you tools to publish illegal ads. In that case, being able to filter ads by race is illegal, and it's on them to offer this option. It would be a different story if there was no option and a publisher just wrote "no people of <race>".

The law in question specifically makes the publisher liable. (It has been applied to newspapers in the past.)

If you get a radio license and setup a web site that allows people to broadcast their own death threats over your radio station, that’s your fault.

In Facebook’s case they not only did that but marketed their death threat service and touted it as highly effective.

That’s a much better metaphor.

>If you get a radio license and setup a web site that allows people to broadcast their own death threats over your radio station, that’s your fault.

Exactly. You are the control operator.

> By the way, if these ads are illegal and conducted through facebook, how easy is it for the FHA to look up who is responsible and go after them. Their whole job is done for them. Going after Facebook is sensational and feels good I guess.

No. Going after Facebook is the only effective way to combat these kinds of illegal ads that occur on its platform. If you get it to comply, then the problem's solved at the source. If you follow your recommendation, HUD wastes its resources continually chasing after small fish, and the problem is never truly solved.

> By the way, if these ads are illegal and conducted through facebook, how easy is it for the FHA to look up who is responsible and go after them.

You say that like there is a clear, deterministic way to audit how Facebook ads are being targeted? I do not think you understand how ad trafficking on Facebook works.

How would the FHA determine that an ad was only being served to white people? Say you see and ad being served and you want to check if it is also being served to a black facebook user. You create a burner account. But now your Facebook feed isn't showing that ad anymore. Is it because of targeting, or is it because Facebook has other ad inventory that they want to show you? What if the inventory of the ad has been exhausted? I could be wrong, but it seems literally impossible to audit Facebook ads without access to Facebook's internals.

Plus we don't know if FHA is going after ad buyers as part of this investigation...

Eh. I get the idea you're going for, but this seems clear cut. Facebook through its ad platform explicitly allows targeting ads (and apparently, avoiding ads) toward people of certain genders, backgrounds, and attributes.

That may be ethical and legal if it's a nightclub or a retail product, but it's not allowed for housing. At a certain scale like Facebook, it should be incumbent on them to disable those ad filters for the ad buyers.

They are enforcing this part of the FHA (emphasis mine):

>(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.

These ads don't indicate any preference though. They are targeted based on a preference (which is not surfaced to the viewers of the ad), but don't actually indicate any preference.

> Why is everyone trying so hard to turn facebook (and google, twitter, etc...) into a filter on everything we say?

Because they are not utility companies and have taken upon themselves to filter results so they gave up safe harbour.

Maybe a comparison with an existing radio station that publishes ads for profit, people submits ads where some are obvious illegal, the radio station is aware about it but since it makes money does absolutely nothing, not even warn their clients.

I do believe it is your responsibility as the radio broadcaster to filter the content that you broadcast. I would think both the broadcaster and the publisher would be in trouble?

Note that other publishers are also liable under these laws. By that I mean papers, craigslist, etc.

This is a specific law targeting specific advertisements. For many other kinds of advertising, facebook is still free from liability. The reason housing advertisements get special treatment is that housing is both a neccesity, and housing trends have a very strong effect on society.

A question if you run ads and tune your ad buy to focus on those people with the highest conversion rate. To reduce the amount you're spending by targeting the ads, does this mean that's not allowed?

It looks like this is to ensure advertisement reaches all protected categories. Can this mean that one would be forced to advertise in magazines that cater to different audiences? To guarantee a certain subset of the population is covered?

Thinking of facebook like traditional media doesn't really work. If we allow people to choose where they're advertising, by definition they're targeting. It'd be like randomly buying ads in magazines and papers.

At the end of the day, it seems more like landlords intent for targeting is more important than anything and that is where the fault lies.

If you had a building in an area that catered to people speaking a minority language (5%) of the population; can you target speakers of that language or do you have to spend 20x?

Compare to jobs. It’s ok to require candidates to speak a minority language iff that has something to do with the job. But it is not ok to require a specific age, gender or marital status.

Landlord ads are more or less like job ads, in that sense.

These aren't requirements though; it's not like saying you must speak Italian to live here. It's more like advertising a job posting for a doctor in a medical journal instead of a car magazine.

Are you seriously comparing advertising job openings to doctors with advertising apartments to only people of a certain race? You can’t just parameterize “x” and call it an argument.

A better comparison is advertising in a catholic newspaper. Is that a discrimination toward non catholics? It’s a bit of a stretch.

Is it not discrimination if there are 2 people reading the same catholic newspaper and one does not see the ad because she is female?

Regardless of where you stand on the issue, there is no analogue in traditional (read: newspaper) advertising.

If you take out an advertisement in a Catholic newspaper, you're focusing on Catholics. But non-Catholics may still read your advertisement if they come upon your newspaper. There is no method in traditional physical media to specifically exclude any demographic; there are only ways to emphasize one demographic over another. This makes digital advertising with demographic-based exclusion (rather than demographic-based inclusion) incomparable to a newspaper.

That difference may seem hollow but it is a difference of category, rather than degree. More important than this point is the observation that these kinds of debates quickly devolve into litigating the appropriateness of imperfect analogies rather than the original issue itself.

No, for a simple reason: A muslim (say) is free to read a catholic newspaper. A muslim is not free to look at catholic-targeted advertising on facebook. In the particular case: If a muslim can't find a house fitting their requirements in their muslim newspaper, they could just buy a catholic newspaper and have a look whether there are any offers in there that are of interest to them. They have no such choice on facebook.

Your metaphor is off. It's like advertising a job posting for a doctor only in majority-white medical schools.

What if a job posting is advertised at a majority black medical school? Is that ok?

I'm kinda LOL on the downvotes. From my understanding (and I replied to OP) is that it is fine. IANAL, though.

When I was in college, lots of recruiters advertise and sponsor with the Society of Black Engineers...of Society of Women Engineers. Nothing stopped me from going to those meetings, and I did attend some. Their meetings were advertised to everyone. You weren't prevented from going to the meeting and listening to the recruiters.

Was I offended...yes and no, but more on the no side because I had the same opportunity as everyone else at school. I'll tell when I was offended. I went to a career fair one semester I saw Microsoft booth that advertised scholarships for minorities (or maybe internships? I don't know, I hope not because that woulda been illegal, in hindsight!).

There was a young Indian woman staffing the booth and I asked if I could apply. She said no...looking for blacks and hispanics. I'm Asian...so was she. Microsoft shoulda sent a black/hispanic engineer to send their message across better, too.

Yes. Because it’s not stopping a white person who happens to be going to an HBCU from seeing the ad. I get flyers all of the time from politicians that target those evil liberals who are trying to change “the culture” of America because they are targeting based on zip code.

Let’s just say when they walk the neighborhood and I open the door, they are flummoxed when they don’t feel comfortable using their usually spiel...

I don't think your metaphor is on point, either. I'm going to guess an ad in a majority-white med school is allowed (can I go on a limb and say most med schools are majority, white, anyways?).

But nothing is stopping a black person from seeing the ad.

In FB's case, it's like posting an ad at a med school (any, med school, regardless of demographics) and say...you can only view this add if you're white.

You’re missing the point entirely. The complaint is about what Facebook has designed their platform to allow, which is very clearly illegal and for very clear reasons. What’s not not clear is how you’ve come to the conclusion that landlords are “where the fault lies”; you’re begging the question by assuming that the fault can entirely be placed on one group or the other. One thing at a time.

The issue is not focusing on demographics, it’s excluding demographics. The law states you cannot exclude certain demographics. Facebook is allowing that.

Nothing is preventing an atheist from reading a Christian magazine, or some non-expected audience member from reading an ad targeted at a general audience. The problem is when you control the viewers on an individual level, as Facebook does.

Actually, targeting of ads to certain publications is illegal in the field of housing; search for "selective use of advertising media or content" at https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/DOC_7781.PDF

> If you had a building in an area that catered to people speaking a minority language (5%) of the population; can you target speakers of that language or do you have to spend 20x?

If I understand correctly, your argument is that optimizing cost goes against making fairness for all its citizens. So, it is a matter of priority. What is more important "fairness and justice" or "cost reduction"?

You can target whoever you want to in traditional media. With traditional media for instance, you can target off campus housing to a majority White college,but there is no way that you can stop a minority from seeing the ads.

With FB, you could target an ad to people who go to that school who are of certain race. (https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/609543/faceboo...)

This is specifically not allowed by the Fair Housing Act.

Devils advocate here, but what if facebook had an Opt-In, where users can allow the features they've entered to limit the ads shown to them? What if I only want ads (from food to housing) in Spanish or Chinese? Can my preference as an individual override having to see ads that I don't want to see?

It doesn’t matter and the law only applies to housing. All of the other analogies are moot.

If you asked a real estate agent could they find you a house in a mostly Jewish community for instance, they are not allowed to help you...

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

Real estate agents can easily find themselves having to explain why they can’t narrow down homes on the market based on the client’s preferences because the requests touch on the protected classes. Babs De Lay, broker and owner of Urban Utah Homes and Estates real estate agency in Salt Lake City, says she worked with friends a few years ago who said they were looking for the “most Jewish, democratic neighborhood” in the area.

You could ask your real estate agent, “Is this a good neighborhood?”

Your agent isn't purposely giving you the run-around. Certain details about a neighborhood or community can violate the Fair Housing Act, which was enacted in 1968 to eliminate housing discrimination. The law protects against discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, disability or family status. In particular, it prohibits any real estate professional from steering prospective homebuyers or renters toward or away from a community based on any of the classes under federal protection.

Why is Facebook in trouble for this and not the persons who actually placed the ads? They aren't the ones renting the real estate. They don't own it. Government overreach imo.

Edit: grammatical mistakes

This is similar to if the NYT ran discriminatory ads - which is an actual case from the 1980s and resulted in both notable fines, and the NYT having humans review housing ads for discriminatory practices, such as having an unrepresentably white set of models in housing ads (from one of the propublica links in some of the other comments). Same goes for craigslist, which also has to screen housing ads.

I'd argue both are responsible - the platform hosting the ad and the people making the ad.

No only person that is responsible is the person who placed the ad. Facebook didn't select the target market and write up the copy.

We need to go by the law here, which indicates an ad publisher is guilty in addition to the one who placed the ad. You may argue an opinion about the law, but it looks like Facebook is in violation of it.

I feel like FB could have covered their ass if they had a pop up menu for every rental ad that says "All ads must abide by the Fair Housing Act...click for more info. Check this box if you acknowledge your advertising practice abides by it"

They are enforcing this part of the FHA (emphasis mine):

If people actually did place housing discrimination ads they'd also be in violation of the law.

(In general, laws are usually written in a way to prevent profiting off of illegal behavior)

But these ads do NOT indicate any preference. These ads simply do not run for the people outside of target audience.

The main reason why racial preferences are not allowed to get published -- is because it reinforces public bias toward specific race. But if ads are simply not shown to some group -- what is the problem with that?

>if ads are simply not shown to some group -- what is the problem with that?

It's illegal, that's the problem.

Rhetorical or not, this question deserves to be upvoted more.

How is it different from hardware store that sell knives that can be used to cut vegetables or people, at the discretion of the buyer?

Maybe a better way to deal with that is a different regulation. Mandate the industry designation in the ad and if it is something protected by existing laws, like housing or job ads, remove filters that allow for adding or removing by protected category from the interface.

There isn't a law on the books prohibiting hardware stores from selling knives.

There is a law on the books prohibiting publishers from publishing descriminitory ads, even if they didn't write them.

That's the difference.

The difference is that the law shouldn't even be on the books imo. The person discriminating is the private property owner/manager they engaged in the advertising. Facebook did not.

Knives have legal uses.

In the context of housing ads (or employment) these tools DO NOT have legal uses.

Thus they are illegal.

I don’t argue that ads in the context of housing is illegal.

Targeting specific demographic using protected categories in other areas can be legal too.

As a pharmaceutical company you can target women, men, seniors for targeted medications. As a LGBTQ dating site you can target based on sexual orientation and cis/trans. It is not illegal. Housing and jobs (maybe something else) are covered by specific legislation.

Agreed. These restrictions only apply in a few legally defined areas.

The fact an LGBT dating site can choose ‘don’t show to heterosexual people (a waste of my ad spend)’ is one of the reasons their platform is so effective, especially compared to mass media like TV/magazines.

That seems like a poor argument for why it should be illegal, since facebook ads are not limited to housing and employment.

The analogous argument for knives would be "In the context of torture knives don't have any legal uses. (So knife sellers need to put safe guards in preventing their knives from torturing people)".

How would a common person know they were discriminated against digitally on Facebook? Why should such a tool geared towards discrimination of protected classes not be held liable when there is no alternative legal use case for allowing filtering of protected classes for displaying of housing ads.

As a user of Facebook, this method of discrimination is markedly different than physically showing up to a house for rent and the home owner taking one look at you, scrunching up their face, and saying it's no longer available, tipping you off that what they are doing is illegal.

If Facebook isn't displaying the ad to you but you walk into the apartment management office and are denied the ability to rent (despite having the means) because you are a minority is Facebook liable? Again Facebook isn't a potential party to a rental or sale agreement. Can't deny you housing. Again Facebook isn't the one placing the ad.

Facebook is aware, by virtue of the filtering in their system that allows such targeting to have, that such advertising is illegal, and chooses to present it (_and make money from it_) anyway.

The laws are on the books because of rampant discrimination against minorities in prior eras. It took the entire civil rights movement to start to make progress on addressing these issues, which included laws making some of the worst practices illegal.

I'm trying not to say anything too mean, so I'll just say this: learn some history.

That (and other replies elsewhere here) answer it perfectly, thank you.

At the very least Facebook could provide section-specific filter, if they haven’t already.

We don't do that for knives.

However, we do have laws about sales of guns, chemical weapons precursors, nuclear fuel, aircraft, etc.

Why is Facebook in trouble for this and not the persons who actually placed the ads?

Wait for it.

What are we waiting for?

Technically, the people who placed the ads are also liable.

Practically speaking, which one sounds better: "HUD files discrimination complaint against Facebook" or "HUD files discrimination complaint against Jimmy's Duplex-Mania in rural Alabama"?

But is HUD going after them?

Raise the relevant budgets, hire a few thousand more US Attorneys and maybe they'll get around to it.

HUD wouldn't be the ones to go after them. Per how the US Government works, the Department of Justice[1] would be the ones to go after the individuals involved. If you go to the DoJ website they have some very recent press releases on redlining prosecution, but I get the feeling it would take a while to figure out if any are related to Facebook ads (there search sucks).

1) https://www.justice.gov/usao/about-offices-united-states-att...

If I'm paid to publish ads for hitmen, am I innocent because I didn't write them?

Because it’s the law. Newspapers also take steps to make sure they are compliant with the Fair Housing Act.

This complaint seems like its shooting itself in the foot - discrimination isn't inherently bad. When you hire, you discriminate based on ability. When you date, you discriminate in a number of ways like beauty, personality, etc. If you're selling ads for wheelchairs you want to discriminate for people with disabilities. If your houses aren't wheelchair accessible, you want your ads to discriminate against people with disabilities. If there are "majority-minority zip codes" then maybe advertising against the demographic is a waste of your time and money.

The idea that we should operate without discrimination is a toothless platitude with little bearing on reality. It is not Facebooks responsibility to change reality because they are able to accurately quantify and qualify it's existence, and sell ads based on their findings.

The day 'discrimination' happens to you, you'll sing a different tune.

It is, however, Facebook's obligation to abide by the law, particularly 50 year old laws with decades of settled case law.

The law is against publishing discriminatory ads (discriminatory wordings that encouraged racial hate).

Facebook ad audience filtering -- is a very different tool.

That’s a straw man.

This case isn’t “no one can discriminate with ads”. It’s “no one can discriminate ILLEGALY with THIS TYPE of ad”.

The law finds the combination of "housing ad" and "discriminatory targeting" to be illegal. You can do discriminatory targeting when you're selling wheelchairs or other products. You can post housing ads. You just can't do both.

> When you hire, you discriminate based on ability

Yes, but not on race, gender, income, sexual orientation, etc.

You might want to look into what the ADA requires about building accommodations for handicapped accessibility. Hint: You aren't compliant just by throwing up your hands and saying "We aren't accessible, don't bother", especially not for commercial real estate. I.e. you can't simply discriminate against handicapped people, which is the problem that necessitated the passing of the law in the first place.

Even residential real estate has to follow a bunch of codes though, like secure railings on all stairways for starters.

> The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in housing transactions including print and online advertisement on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, disability, or familial status.

Emphasis mine.

If the FHA does indeed prohibit online advertisement discriminating on those criteria, this sounds pretty damning to Facebook. Those are some of the key features of Facebook ads.

https://www.justice.gov/crt/fair-housing-act-2 Sec. 804 (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.

This clearly covers online or any other kind of ad.

I just found that same page. The heading to that section is:

> Sec. 804. [42 U.S.C. 3604] Discrimination in sale or rental of housing and other prohibited practices

Looks like if this goes to trial it's all going to hinge on exactly what "To publish an advertisement, with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling, with an intention to make a preference based on race, color, ..." means. To me that seems quite clearly to refer to the ad itself - that the ad cannot make a preference, implicitly or explicitly, for any group. However, who the ad is shown to would seem to be another issue altogether.

If this applies even in who the ads is shown to, think about the implications. What if I run an ad in e.g. "Golf Digest Weekly"? Would that be unlawful for that publication to actually publish? What if I place a billboard in a high income area? Is the billboard renter liable? Is my ad unlawful? If I place a for-sale sign in the yard of a vacant house in a high-end neighborhood, is that unlawful as well?

I'd like to think the HUD has thought out their case and it's implications, but I don't see how you can take their interpretation of this law without practically destroying all housing ads - which is clearly not their intent. So I'm very anxious to see how this plays out in court!

Yes, your examples are potentially unlawful. See HUD's guidelines here: https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/DOC_7781.PDF

> § 109.25 Selective use of advertising media or content.

If this sounds burdensome, it's supposed to be, changing society and correcting centuries of inequality and discrimination requires significant active effort.

Also remember that intent and reasonable expectations matter. You as an individual with limited means and no legal advice would be held to a different standard than Facebook, a corporation with many orders of magnitude more responsibility.

Finally, remember that law is not code. The Fair Housing Act is a tool to be used judiciously by humans to correct wrongs, not a precise standard that can be applied in the same way to every situation. It's not possible to write a law that anticipates every possible scenario, that's why we write relatively vague laws and involve humans at every step of the process.

You can't conflate issues here. There are two major questions in play:

1) Is it unlawful for the advertiser to publish advertisements that may result in an individual selectively advertising? There seems to be no law or guidance even suggesting that the answer is yes here. For instance, under your guidance the billboard owner (who then rents it to the advertiser) would not be liable for not ensuring that the advertiser was advertising in a sufficiently broad, or random, variety of locations to fulfill the legal regulations. Facebook in this case is not the person placing the advertisements - but the venue of advertisement.

2) Is it unlawful for a person to advertise without complete demographic representation? This is not what this case is about, though it's an interesting question. The HUD's guidance makes this quite clear though, like you mention, that is guidance from the HUD and not necessarily the law itself. Government agencies tend to take very broad positions on laws, but these interpretations do not always hold up in the courts. It would be interesting to see how this point is argued from both sides, though this is a tangential issue.

This case is quite peculiar though since the HUD release seems to be building a case based on #2, yet targeting a defendant was would be implied from #1. This seems highly inconsistent, so again - it should be very interesting to see how this case develops.

Not the OP but all Facebook had to do was put up a simple click through when posting a housing ad. Something like - "This listing must comply with Federal law, by posting you claim full responsibility." and a link to the law.

In your example if I was the billboard owner and someone wanted to display an ad that was federally regulated I would absolve my liability by making the customer sign off on the fact that their ad complies with federal law.

Just seems so simple. I guess the money blinded them. Seems the status quo for Facebook.

The ads themselves are protected, but wouldn’t the publication venue not be covered? Otherwise housing ads in the Chicago Defender would be illegal right?

The publication is indeed liable. The language isn't about placing the ad: "To make, print, or publish, or cause to be made, printed, or published any notice, statement, or advertisement..."

A classic example was a case brought against the New York Times for discriminatory housing classified ads.

Now, what's interesting here is that Facebook is involved in the targeting. So, if you only place housing ads in the Chicago Defender, and don't place them in White newspapers, the Defender isn't involved in your discrimination; however, if you place ads in the Defender stating "Black Tenants Only" and the Defender published those, the Defender would probably be liable. And if you pay an advertising firm and tell them to only place your ad in "Black" newspapers then that firm that did the targeting would be liable.

(Although in terms of enforcement priorities, such discrimination is probably very small-scale and wouldn't be very high up on HUD's or DoJ's list.)

Wow, this page is pretty damning evidence:

https://www.facebook.com/business/success/quadrant-homes

It basically is showing that Facebook knowingly implemented a system to discriminate against people. Even the stock photos are full of white people.

Here's hoping HUD makes a big example out of them and fines them to the fullest extent of the law.

Huh. The stock photo at the top of that link for me has a picture of a white man, an Asian woman, and an Asian-looking little girl. There are no other stock photos on the page.

https://imgur.com/gHzzBXU

I mean, asians look white to me.

It would seem fairly straightforward for Facebook to collect information about whether an advertisement pertains to something that has anti-discriminatory regulations tied to it (housing, employment).

I generally agree that FB should not be allowed to permit users to segment these types of advertisements by the dimensions claimed. However, what piques my curiosity here is whether “indirect” discrimination in choice of advertising medium constitutes discriminatory practice.

For instance, what if some of these advertisers, instead of segmenting directly by race to target whites only, targeted fans of pages that were obviously but not specifically comprised of whites (e.g., “Irish American Heritage” or “Blonde Hair Tips”). Would there be a case to be made for discrimination? And against whom?

What about housing ad posted only in places like whole foods or a particular newspaper. I know my previous landlady did this.

In practice, for better or worse, a lot of things escape notice when done obliquely at small scale.

Yeah I guess there is a balance you have strike in order not to become an Orwellian society.

It seems to me that even though the intention of that is discriminatory in some way (and not necessarily against protected classes - the Whole Foods ads might be simply to target higher-income tenants), it's not in fact exclusionary. There's nothing preventing anyone who's not the normal target of these ads from going to Whole Foods or buying those newspapers. In FB's case the excluded audience has no chance of ever seeing those ads.

> There's nothing preventing anyone who's not the normal target of these ads from going to Whole Foods

You could argue whole foods prices do prevent vast majority of ppl from going to whole foods.

Sure. But income or wealth aren't protected classes. And anyone can walk into a Whole Foods just to see the ads, without spending any money. There is targeting happening when you advertise in Whole Foods but it's not discriminatory against a protected class.

There's actually something called "disparate impact" in Fair Housing that covers this. So if someone does something like that, especially intentionally, and it impacts a protected class, they can be sued and fined.

In fact, since most cases are not so blatantly obvious as this, using disparate impact is often how these cases are brought.

If only FB had an insane amount of data that could trivially be used to figure out if a given criteria would have a disparate impact.

I can’t imag them fighting this, theyvseem so unlikely to win.

But then again, I’m surprised corporate counsel wasn’t screaming about this. It’s not the first time I’ve read about this and I don’t work there.

Is your position that it should be illegal to use a criterion in ad targeting if the use of this criterion results in an ad being seen by one arm of a protected category more than another arm?

That's a consistent position, but it amounts to banning of ad targeting. Is that the world you want?

The law explicitly says you can’t discriminate housing ads against certain groups. Courts have held that Things that aren’t illegal on their face can be illegal if they have highly discriminatory effect in practice.

So I don’t see why any of that should be allowed here.

And it would only apply to things that have a heavy discriminatory effect. I don’t see why it would matter if you chose not to advertise your non-pet friendly apartment complex to people who have pets. Unless someone can show that’s a pretty direct proxy to a protected class it seems fine.

Again, this only applies to kinds of ads covered by this (or similar) laws. Housing and employment are the only two kinds I know of. I see no reason why you should be restricted in who you choose to advertise your new T-shirt to.

Is the answer to my question "yes" or "no"?

Sorry, I assumed you knew my answer was yes.

The law says the answer is yes if the discriminatory effect is strong enough (don’t know what the actual test is), so the answer MUST be yes.

> I don’t see why it would matter if you chose not to advertise your non-pet friendly apartment complex to people who have pets. Unless someone can show that’s a pretty direct proxy to a protected class it seems fine.

As a matter of fact, pet ownership is a strong proxy for a protected class [1].

Is your position that an apartment building owner should have to advertise to pet owners and non pet owners equally even if the apartment complex doesn't allow pets?

Come to think of it, isn't having a no-pets policy itself discriminatory?

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/250858/dog-or-cat-owners...

I didn’t know that. Well, if it meets whatever HUD/the courts’ threshold is for something that’s too discriminatory then maybe that’s off the list.

I know that pet friendly and non-pet friendly housing exists, so there must be some legal basis.

But if the current legal standard meant that it would be illegal to advertise to (or away from) pet owners then yes, I would expect that FB would have to remove those options for housing ads.

Guess that wasn’t the clear example I was hoping for.

Is a "no pets" policy illegal housing discrimination? Why or why not?

A "no pets" policy, on its face, would have a disparate impact on different arms of a protected group, and so, on its face, should be illegal. I know that "no pets" policies tolerated at this point.

What I want to know is how you or anyone else can justify a "no pets" policy considering the protected group issue I raised above. Is the "no pets" policy just an unprincipled exception [1]?

I see no explanation for allowing "no pets" policies other than "yeah, 'no pets' amounts to illegal discrimination, but everyone does it, so it's okay". That's not a good basis on which to organize a society. Why or why not shouldn't people make another unprincipled exception for ad targeting?

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/04/a-series-of-unprinciple...

Again, I don’t know the actual reason, just that it’s clearly legal.

Many people are very allergic to pets or scared of them and won’t live in a building/complex if there are animals there. If you’re a landlord and you allow pets you also have to deal with any possible damage they may do to your property, even though you can make the renter reimburse you for that.

It may be that because of those factors courts have determined that it’s perfectly reasonable for landlords to choose not to allow pets no matter what effect that may have on the number of people of different races who apply to their properties.

It’s not just (presumably) his position, it’s the law. And there is a good reason for it. Look up red lining.

So, is it your opinion that ad targeting is illegal?

That’s not what anyone here saying and you know it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17791675

That's only a counter if you ignore the second half of the sentence.

There is a very big difference between no micro-targeting ads ever, and no micro-targeting for housing ads.

You don't need an insane amount of data. It's easy to figure out if any given criteria will have a disparate impact -- all criteria have a disparate impact.

IMNAL and I dont have a source, but I believe credit agencies were once sued for this type of indirect discrimination. If I remember correctly, the argument was that credit scores unfairly treated some protected classes.

It's easy until you realize how global Facebook's audience is. What happens if California makes this type of advertising illegal for hotels and Sri Lanka makes it illegal for movie theaters? Now repeat for every possible advertising law.

The telecom industry is already 40 years down this path, the level of regulations, state, county and city E911 fees and operating regulations is impressive. If scrappy, insolvent players like Sprint can write code to comply with onerous, numerous and varying regulations across 7000 different LATAs, Facebook can handle writing code to comply with national laws in 200 odd countries.

Facebook (and others) can choose to show ads in any jurisdiction it wants, but if it does it has to follow the rules there. If they want to show ads in day Sri Lanka then they have to read up on and follow the laws there. In some cases it will not be worth it.

>and/or zip code.

>effectively limit housing options for these protected classes

I have head of zip code being protected or personally identifiable information but never a protected class

Also fun fact, "age" as a protected class in the US only refers to discrimination against people over the age of 40.

It's not really a protected class, but a case of redlining, which is, to quote wikipedia:

"the systematic denial of various services to residents of specific, often racially associated, neighborhoods or communities"

>Also fun fact, "age" as a protected class in the US only refers to discrimination against people over the age of 40.

In employment law, not housing law.

As far as I know HOPA is the only federal law affecting housing age and it allows them to create "senior only" communities. So it is effectively the same. Older people can discriminate against younger people but younger people cannot discriminate against older people.

>Older people can discriminate against younger people

No.

Family status is protected in housing law, so no, a landlord can't refuse to rent to someone because they have young children.

Exceptions apply for certain senior living communities, but they are 55+, not 40+.

That is not what OP is saying...

Because of de facto segregation, zip code can be highly correlative to a protected class.

There is interesting precedent in the form of Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates.com, LLC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Housing_Council_of_San_Fe...

Worth reading the case to understand what FB is up against here.

What many commenters do not understand here is that Facebook is making a killing by allowing this kind of illegal targeting. They know what's going on but they clearly don't care unless they get sued. In the meanwhile they made millions/forced the competition out/made it "standard"...

I do technology at an MLS and we police our listings and have agents change terminology that may violate fair housing laws, including things like "man cave" (a frequent violation). For a while we were also contacting agents if they used drone photos of the property, because of restrictions on the commercial use of drones.

Can anyone tell me what kind of penalty Facebook could face for this? Are we talking

a) A token fine

b) A fine large enough that it sees investors taking action against the management

c) A fine that is an existential threat to Facebook

d) Jail time for executives

e) Forced closure

I just wonder if anyone can suggest how serious this could be if they are found to be I the wrong?

Just a small fine and remedial action to resolve the violation. This also happens to traditional businesses.

So I guess it might turn out to have been ap good business decision to ignore the law?

Yes, the fine whatever it is will be magnitudes less than the profit they made off of the ad discrimination.

I think most likely is a consent decree that says they're not allowed to engage in this behavior, and the gov has the right to inspect their operations to ensure compliance. That along with a token fine.

Why is this Facebook's fault? Wouldn't this be the advertiser's fault for choosing those filters?

You can also conduct illegal activity via Facebook messenger of groups, does that make it Facebook's fault?

Because the law happens to make the advertising platforms liable. It does so because enforcing this as an individual crime is impractical for the government, so it essentially outsources the work to advertising publishers.

See e.g. a similar case brought against the New York Times in the 80s, and the resulting investment by the Times in a reviewing process where humans went through submitted ads looking for discrimination.

If a newspaper published an ad for real estate for “Whites only”. They would be held responsible.

This is why you need a wide range of experiences represented in your company. Monocultures tend to miss things that are obvious to others.

I'm no fan of Facebook or discrimination, and am happy to see this pursued by the federal government, but I personally would gladly be excluded from all ads, ranging from billboards to search results to food packaging.

I guess what I'm thinking is, if Facebook had a feature (maybe it does, I'm not a user) allowing members to search housing classifieds, and if that feature allowed listing agents to discriminate against who saw their listings in results, that would be straight up bullshit. But, AFAIK, anyone can anonymously search different housing listing platforms for available housing wherever they want to live, so I guess I'm just struggling to see how housing advertising is worth this sort of scrutiny at all.

Again, I stress that discrimination is fucked and I'm happy to see something being done about it on any level, at all. I just feel like there are surely bigger fish to fry and spending resources on pursuing to whom/how ads are delivered doesn't seem like the best investment.

The issue here is that Facebook is explicitly allowing the property owners to make discriminatory housing ads. It doesn't matter how many other sources there are because publishers are also forbidden from making discriminatory ads in the law.

In the end they're going to have to either stop allowing housing ads or remove any filtering for those ads that relate to a protected class (including any fine grained geographic filters too probably because those turn into a racial proxy pretty quickly) and anything that's a significant proxy for something like race.

It would seem the education system has failed significantly if the serious issues with segregation, racism and discrimination that have plagued the country remain unknown to the extent that half the commentators here don't seem to understand why laws were passed, why Facebook is wrong and why things are the way they are.

It's as if they don't understand how widespread racism, discrimination and segregation was, how it was systematically enforced, how it occurred and continues to occur and why these measures remain important.

Given this affected parties must continue the fight because that's the only way to confront selective memories, denial and ignorance.

We simply have laws for these.

If the laws still do not deter then increase the penalty until they’re adhered to. Such that it will leave no such question as to whose responsibility it is.

If we do not want such laws then repeal them.

Only the rule of law will prevail here.

Simply know the rules, or pay the penalty.

From an ethics point of view, why is this illegal?

This creates ghettos

This law was created in 1968 IIRC. Ghettos still exist today, in 2018, 50 years laters. It seems to me the law is not doing anything.

Because American culture has a tendency to exclude certain groups, and allowing that to go too far in vital markets like housing and labor is bad for social stability.

I'm not in the business of defending Facebook, I neither like their business model nor their product...but this is an unreasonable accusation levied against them.

Their business is "I know ABCDEF about people, who would you like me to distribute your content to?"

Distributing content to people along ABCDE and F demographics happens to be legal in almost every case. The exception is specific housing discrimination laws that prevent filtering on ABC, etc.

It is outrageously unreasonable to expect Facebook to be responsible for the specific laws surrounding advertising for their customers. They provide targeted advertising. If their client targets demographics using an advertising strategy that happens to be illegal within their own industry, the responsibility is on the client/landlord, not Facebook. This is very much akin to blaming Microsoft for someone hacking from a Windows PC, or blaming the phonebook for a Chinese person emphasizing cold calls to the "Lee" portion of the book. If their actions are illegal, so be it, but the automatic assumption that the platform is responsible for the content that their users produce is fundamentally flawed.

They're not responsible... until they're told about it.

Traditionally platforms benefit from safe harbour by being neutral, but the whole point here is that the decision about who to show the ads to can only be made by Facebook.

The law on housing discrimination is quite clear and even-handed on this topic - ad distributors are liable for discriminatory ads they publish (the law specifically includes "publishes" in the list of criminal verbs, and this was actually enforced in court against the New York Times in the 80s); and selectively-targeted ads are discriminatory (see Code of Federal Regulations section 109.25, down near the bottom of https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/DOC_7781.PDF)

The law is quite clear about an advertiser’s liability.

https://fairhousing.com/legal-research/hud-resources/adverti...

Section 804(c) of the Act prohibits the making, printing and publishing of advertisements which state a preference, limitation or discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin. The prohibition applies to publishers, such as newspapers and directories, as well as to persons and entities who place real estate advertisements. It also applies to advertisements where the underlying property may be exempt from the provisions of the Act, but where the advertisement itself violates the Act. See 42 U.S.C. 3603 (b).

Publishers and advertisers are responsible under the Act for making, printing, or publishing an advertisement that violates the Act on its face. Thus, they should not publish or cause to be published an advertisement that on its face expresses a preference, limitation or discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin. To the extent that either the Advertising Guidelines or the case law do not state that particular terms or phrases (or closely comparable terms) may violate the Act, a publisher is not liable under the Act for advertisements which, in the context of the usage in a particular advertisement, might indicate a preference, limitation or discrimination, but where such a preference is not readily apparent to an ordinary reader. Therefore, complaints will not be accepted against publishers concerning advertisements where the language might or might not be viewed as being used in a discriminatory context.

As far as roommates....

For example, Intake staff should not accept a complaint against a newspaper for running an advertisement which includes the phrase female roommate wanted because the advertisement does not indicate whether the requirements for the shared living exception have been met. Publishers can rely on the representations of the individual placing the ad that shared living arrangements apply to the property in question. Persons placing such advertisements, however, are responsible for satisfying the conditions for the exemption. Thus, an ad for a female roommate could result in liability for the person placing the ad if the housing being advertised is actually a separate dwelling unit without shared living spaces. See 24 CFR 109.20.

This is simply WEBLINING, an online version of the 1960s Redlining.

See http://www.netopia.eu/weblining-why-eating-at-nandos-could-c...

The adtech industry is probably having emergency meetings with its legal staff. What's this imply for targeted advertising, and how are we going to police the legality of which ads can target what given laws against discrimination?

We all knew that creating/adopting centralized communication platforms ("Web 2.0") was going to end badly, but that was where the money (temporarily) was. Now that they've taken over our culture, it's not surprising that every small time censor is showing up with their demands.

(Also, as we're going through an $ideology-scare, a disclaimer: I'm not criticizing the ultimate goal of anti-discrimination housing laws, nor even HUD for going after Faceboot here - but really pointing out the utterly predictable no-win situation these centralizing companies have created for themselves)

How is it futile to comply with the law and not help facilitate discrimination?

Reminiscent of IBM's history.

The communication middlemen make their profits by being scalable - surveilling users for a few bucks each doesn't add up to much otherwise. Policing speech is not scalable - hence now trying to bolt on the bare minimum after the fact using low paid workers.

Yeah, surveilling is not profitable, unless reimbursed by the government.

So if I pretend in front of facebook I am poor, I can see less ads? Sounds good :)

I would prefer to have no ads.

curl: (6) Could not resolve host: www.hud.gov

Facebook goes after Trump’s attack dog (Alex Jones); Trump’s department goes after Facebook.

I was skeptical, but upon reading TFA, they do have a point.

Yeah, although it seems mostly to be by accident: you can target you facebook ads to whatever group you want, so your bra sales only target women, or your stroller offers only target people with smaller children.

Personally I think the law is bullshit: what is interesting, and what we want to prevent, isn't landlords who can target only some group, but landlords who _do_.

But I guess facebook makes for an interesting target.

How would you prevent landlords from targeting some group without a law that prevents landlords from targeting some group?

Maybe there's something inherently wrong with targeted ads...

Maybe there's something inherently wrong with thought-policing via "anti-discrimination" laws.

Pretty much every ad ever written in any medium is targeted to some degree or other.

"Targeting" seems to me to be completely synonymous with "discriminating".

Is it inherently wrong to publish an ad in the Wall Street Journal and not then publish the same ad in Teen Vogue?

No, which suggests to me that something changes when you cross from print advertising to digital advertising, but I'm not sure what.

Is it wrong to publish an ad on the Wall Street Journal website and not run the same ad on the Teen Vogue website?

Is that something that actually happens? Do people say "let's run this ad on teenvogue.com"? Don't websites (especially businesses of the scale of WSJ/vogue/etc) get their ads from ad networks?

My question stands.

It's easy in current ad targeting setups to limit an ad to running on particular sites or to prohibit an ad from running on certain sites.

If someone were to run an ad and configure the campaign such that it appeared on the Wall Street Journal website and not the Teen Vogue website, would this action have any different moral or legal character from deciding to run a print at in the Wall Street Journal instead of Teen Vogue?

Why or why not?

No. Because anyone can buy the WSJ and Teen Vogue and see the ad.

If you're excluded from being targeted by an FB ad you have no chance of seeing it. If that exclusion criteria forms the basis of a protected class and the ad in question relates to housing, that's illegal. So it's a very narrow set of behaviors that are wrong here, not all of ad targeting.

E.g. it's probably not illegal (or even morally wrong) to exclude someone who is interested in topics such as "Hinduism" from ads for beef jerky. Even though religion is a protected class, beef jerky isn't housing.

Similarly, it's (probably) not wrong to exclude low-income people from ads for your high-end condo because AFAIK income isn't a protected class.

I'm not sure it's that easy. The complaint dings Facebook for allowing targeting of ads by zip code. Isn't it the case in principle that people choose to live in certain areas? I don't think that discriminating on the basis of voluntary association that happens to correlate with protected group membership is enough to spare one from HUD's gaze.

That's just one of the charges. The others are even more damning - targeting by sex, religion or country of origin.

Bras and strollers are not essentials for living. Housing is. That's why Fair Housing laws, and not "fair marketing" laws exist.

> what we want to prevent, isn't landlords who can target only some group, but landlords who _do_.

Sort of. Landlords will always, intentionally or unintentionally, target one group or the other, simply because they can't advertise literally everywhere. The important things are that the contents of the ads aren't discriminatory against protected classes, and they can in theory be seen by anyone who buys the right paper or sees the handbill or billboard or TV ad. FB's targeting appears to remove the possibility of equality of opportunity to view the ads. There's never a reason to allow filtering by protected classes on housing ads, so FB shouldn't have ever provided it as a feature whether directly or indirectly.

Essentially an archaic organisation using an archaic law against a modern ad delivery platform. What a travesty.

Regulator land grab imo. FHA is intended to regulate the owners of real estate. HUD shouldn't be in the advertising regulation business.

... except the FHA literally has text that specifically applies to housing advertisements. They are enforcing the letter of the law.

>(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.

Would you please stop using HN primarily for political battle? It's destructive of what this site exists for, the site guidelines ask you not to, and we ban accounts that continue doing it, regardless of their politics.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I am unable to see any political arguments here. Need to take off your hippie glasses I suppose.

The issue is that you've been using HN primarily for that, which is against the site guidelines. You've also used more than one account to do it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I've banned this account until we get some indication that you want to use HN as intended, and will from now on.

Is complaining against Facebook the new black ?

So they want FB to make "housing" ads a separate, algorithmically tracked entity like political ads are. Not a fan - where would it end?

It would end where the specific categories of advertising are not the ones specifically covered by legislation. Off the top of my head - housing, employment, and political campaigning.

I don't really see how this should be against the law. It is only advertising.

So you should be allowed to advertise anything even if illegal?

Like hitman services?

I'm not really seeing how it's Facebook's job to enforce this particular law as opposed to the HUD whose job it is to go after landlords/sellers doing the actual discriminating.

Just because the advertiser can use these tools to discriminate doesn't mean they actually do or mean they aren't 100% personally responsible to comply with the law.

I was kind of under the impression there were checks and balances to prevent these sorts of governmental fishing expeditions...

Because the text of the law literally says it is.

This isn’t a question of an agency interpretating a law to mean X, it’s right there in the text.

It was written with newspaper classifieds in mind (and probably other things). But it clearly applies.

If you ignore the section which prohibits overt (and blatantly illegal) discrimination then the section which applies to this case is the "intention to discriminate" clause which requires Facebook to determine intent behind the targeting of the advertisements.

And, as we all know, nobody wants Facebook to be the Thought Police. Umm, well...most people don't want Facebook to be the Thought Police but that's besides the point.

Now (if HUD's arguments are valid) Facebook needs to determine if a landlord trying to run an efficient ad campaign or is making sure the "wrong kind of people" don't apply to be tenants. Either way the burden of proof is on Facebook since they are directly accountable for the thought processes of a third party simply by giving them the ability to discriminate against prospective tenants while (one would hope) not intending to discriminate against anyone themselves.

So, yes, I'm sticking by my original opinion that it isn't Facebook's responsibility to do HUD's job of rooting out the bad actors.

> If you ignore the section which prohibits overt (and blatantly illegal) discrimination

Why should we ignore it? It sounds like Facebook allows you to use those exact things to target your ad. Thus the problem.

Because it applies to cases like "only WASP's need apply" and is clearly not what HUD is concerned with here.

Absolutely nobody is arguing that Facebook isn't liable in such a case because it's clearly spelled out in the letter of the law.

I would think HUD would be very concerned about the fact you can run a housing ad and choose “don’t show the black people“.

Yes it’s blatant discrimination, and that’s exactly the problem.

The ability to say “don’t show to fans of Soulja Boy“ could certainly be a big problem, and I’m sure they might look into that too, but the first one is still there.

Facebook can tell that something is problematic / illegal.

So, Facebook should be free to profit from taking and selling, displaying those ads, without restriction? After all, they're not the ones doing anything illegal, right?

0) Not to justify but to give a similar example: CL rarely takes (or took in the past) down zillions of postings that are/were blatantly illegal, i.e., “Seeking roommate: female ONLY.”

1) People are going to discriminate, even if it’s illegal. Heck, I was at a restaurant and an Israeli couple were smugly grinning about how they were discriminating against a candidate whom was “male and too old” by wasting his time and not calling them back. It sucks, but you can’t legislate not being an asshat, even with ostensibly anti-asshat laws.

Craigslist doesn't take down "Seeking roommate: female ONLY" because those ads are not illegal.

https://www.craigslist.org/about/FHA

>Federal Fair Housing laws prohibit discriminatory advertising in all housing, regardless of how large or small the property. However, as discussed below, advertising which expresses a preference based upon sex is allowed in shared living situations where tenants will share a bathroom, kitchen, or other common area.

>Shared Housing Exemption -- If you are advertising a shared housing unit, in which tenants will be sharing a bathroom, kitchen, or other common area, you may express a preference based upon sex only.

I HAVE seen Craigslist take down apartment ads that list religious preferences.

Followed to its logical conclusion, this sort of complaint prohibits all ad targeting, and that's a very bad thing.

Practically any criterion X you might use to restrict an ad's audience will have non-uniform correlations with group demographics. You can't wish away these correlations: they're true facts about the world. These non-uniform correlations allow activists to argue that allowing advertisers to target based on X is therefore prohibited discrimination. They can repeat this process for all X.

Now, you might argue that ad targeting is bad. That's a common position on HN. But it's not true: ad targeting is good for advertisers, since it enables more efficient advertising, and it's good for users, since it subjects them to less noise and exposes them to ads more likely to be relevant to them. Ad targeting also undergirds practically the entire tech economy. That probably means you, reader of this comment.

Where exactly should restrictions on ad targeting stop?

EDIT: For clarity:

Step 1: HUD files a complaint against Facebook for allowing ad targeting based on certain criteria.

Step 2: Facebook bans advertising targeting based on the criteria in the HUD complaint.

Step 3: Advertisers react by targeting based on demographic correlates of the categories from step #1.

Step 4: HUD notices that ads are still getting delivered more to one group than another.

GOTO STEP #1.

There's no clear point at which this process stops. Demographic correlates are numerous and strong. Are you going to ban all of them? That's tantamount to banning ad targeting generally!

So it eliminates the financial incentive for massive private surveillance?

It stops at the product, no? It seems more acceptable to target advertisements for toys than housing.

Should Facebook be liable for allowing an advertiser to target a housing ad at people with preferences for organic food?

Our legal system will not hold Facebook liable for a case like that.

Should?? Like how things ought to be with the world? Facebook shouldn't even know who prefers organic food. There should be nothing tying that preference to any other aspect of people's lives. Facebook should be more like Reddit where people can have whatever accounts they want and can interact on organic food topics without identifying themselves or tying that preference to other interests. Or maybe Facebook should have an explicit opt-in for users to choose what they're okay with being used for ads… … should? everyone should use an adblocker and block Facebook's ads. Also, Facebook should offer a service where you can choose to portray yourself as whatever mix of qualities you want to set for each time you search for something. So anyone should be able to see what the algorithm delivers for a set of characteristics they can adjust at will…

Also, I should stop procrastinating on HN

> Our legal system will not hold Facebook liable for a case like that.

I have to disagree with you on that. I'd put money on targeting a housing advertisement toward someone with a preference for organic food to be ruled discriminatory within five years. It's an unavoidable logical consequence of the logic driving today's complaint.

The problem with your argument is FB doesn’t matter to your point.

The law already exists if that will happen as you say, it will happen no matter what FB does.

So why should FB get to ignore the law unlike thousands of other businesses? Why do they get an exception?

You are misrepresenting my position. Where did I suggest that FB get an exemption from the law? I never said that FB should get special treatment. For clarity, FB should follow the law and prohibit targeting of housing ads based on this list of criteria.

My original point (which has now been downvoted into oblivion, presumably because it raises uncomfortable questions) is that we as an industry need to ask the question "What next?". We know that these regulations will not in fact stop housing discrimination and that more will follow.

It's disappointing that we're unable to have a frank discussion of this subject, since it's important both legally and economically. All the responses in this thread have essentially been that we shouldn't ask "What next?" because the "next" part hasn't happened yet. That's just ostrich-in-sand thinking.

> We know that these regulations will not in fact stop housing discrimination

We don’t know that. I imagine if that was true it would have been proved clearly in the last 40 years. But the law still exists. I’ve not aware of attempts to repeal it.

> and that more will follow.

Again, we’ve had 40 years for this.

So many people in this thread arguing against HUD seem to be trying to argue like this law is something new, like a soda tax, that has very little history or case law. Where the best we can do is hypotheticals. That’s not the case.

> It's disappointing that we're unable to have a frank discussion of this subject

I find it scary that we’re having a discussion. As I see it the story is ‘FB refuses to comply with 40 year old law’, and there are a lot of people arguing they don’t like the idea behind the law so why should they?

Because it’s a 40 year old law. It’s been to the Supreme Court at least once (2015). You don’t get to choose to ignore it because you don’t like it and then get mad when the government tried to punish you for it.

> All the responses in this thread have essentially been that we shouldn't ask "What next?" because the "next" part hasn't happened yet

FHA was 1968. So 50 years, not 40. We have 50 years of ‘next’ to look at.

> That's just ostrich-in-sand thinking.

What is ignoring 50 years of impact and acting like we don’t know how the law would be enforced?

Again? My read of this story was purely as a ‘tech giant decides to ignore he law because they can get away with it’ and had nothing to do with the law in question.

I should have expected HN to see it as ‘poor company bullied by law that theoretically may be problematic based on someone’s beliefs’. I’ve been here far long enough. I should have known. But I didn’t. I looked at the thread. Sigh.

> We don’t know that. I imagine if that was true it would have been proved clearly in the last 40 years.

I don't think it was possible before today's microtarget-based internet advertising to use demographic correlates to substitute for banned targeting of protected groups. That it's now much more feasible than it's ever been in the past to target protected groups without facially making protected group membership part of the filtering process puts anti-discrimination legislation in a new position. The past 50 years of case law isn't particularly relevant to this new situation: in 1968, it wasn't possible to filter ads based on a suite of seemingly-irrelevant characteristics so as to accurately re-create banned targeting.

There is some precedent (e.g., Griggs) for applying a "disparate impact" standard to anti-discrimination measures. My argument is that this reasoning, if followed rigorously, will essentially prohibit ad targeting altogether, since every meaningful ad targeting criterion will end up targeting different arms of protected groups differently.

I've seen no rebuttal of this point, either from you or from anyone else.

> I find it scary that we’re having a discussion

Now that's a terrifying thought. A discussion!

> I don't think it was possible before today's microtarget-based internet advertising to use demographic correlates to substitute for banned targeting of protected groups.

Legal history would prove you wrong. Racist seem to be willing to spend a very large amount of time trying to come up with ways to not have to live next to/rent to certain groups of people. You didn’t need a Pentium 4 to figure out that far fewer black people went to college in the 70s and requiring a college degree would be a pretty good way of filtering them out of your application process.

By now you've posted like 30 comments in this thread and repeatedly broken the site guidelines in multiple ways. Please stop—intense argumentation with sharp elbows is the stuff of flamewars, not intellectually curious discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't buy your argument in the slightest. Slippery slopes exist, but the whole point legally is to NOT allow us to go down such slopes. The law defines the (fuzzy) lines. Once it seems to be slipping down a slope, there will be a point where the law (judges) will stop slipping.

If there's an organic restaurant or grocer in a neighborhood, it makes sense to market to those who prefer organic food. There's nothing stopping anyone of any race or background from preferring organic food other than price or education/awareness etc.

Short of laws that ban targeted advertising in general, there will never be a law saying that you can't target people with some consumer preference.

If you tried to avoid black folks by not showing an ad to people who like stereotypical black consumer products, you'd be more likely to get away with it. There would be some burden of proof that you were doing this as a proxy for the protected class.

The core point is that our laws are more likely to have effective loopholes that undermine the actual intention than to have slippery slopes that take the intention and go way too far with it.

No. Because a preference for organic food isn't a protected class.

What if it correlates with protected group membership, like zip code does?

That's a hypothetical question. Does it really correlate with protected group memberships?

> Does it really correlate with protected group memberships?

Yes: "the vast majority of families (73%) who buy organic describe themselves as white" [1]

Now, you might say, "Okay then. Let's prohibit ad targeting by food preference." But the trouble is that there are hundreds of factors that correlate with protected group membership. Are you going to ban them all?

[1] https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2015/04/03/Who-buy...

Yes. Disable micro targeting four housing ad listings.

> But the trouble is that there are hundreds of factors that correlate with protected group membership. Are you going to ban them all?

It's a tough question to answer. I believe you were debating me about the use of ZIP code as a proxy in another comment thread so I'll touch on that also.

If it's found that organic food preference is systemically being used as a proxy for a protected class, as ZIP code has been in the past, then it might end up being banned. By following this process could you end up with a list of hundreds of banned factors? In theory yes, but in practice it seems unlikely, just because of how long it would take to study each factor and go through the process of adding it to a banned list. It took a long time for redlining to be made illegal. The article you provided says that organic food preference is gradually starting to mirror the general population, so if current trends continue it eventually won't be useful as a signal for race-based discrimination. Furthermore unlike redlining, there's no vicious circle of "I eat non-organic food -> I can't get a loan to buy organic food -> I have to continue eating non-organic food". By the time you had enough data to decide whether discrimination based on a particular factor constitutes de facto discrimination against a protected class, that correlation might have ceased to exist.

It doesn't expose me to relevant ads. I live in Montreal. My last three twitter ads were for a drug (reported as illegal) something about a new york lawsuit against an oil company? And for a pizza place which doesn't exist in my country.

User targeted ads do not produce better ads, despite everyone selling ads saying so.

Am I supposed to accept your anecdote as evidence? I mean, on the one hand, we have the massive and continued success of platforms that tailor ads to target audiences, and on the other, we have freeone3000's complaint about a pizza ad not being relevant.

Ad targeting works. That's a fact. You can argue that we should kill ad targeting anyway, that's fine. You can make that case, and I'd disagree. But to flatly deny that ad targeting works? That's adopting a private set of alternative facts, and if you do that, we can't have a conversation.

Have you seen targeted ads that do work? An advertisement for a product you actually want?

Yes. Do you have an argument based on evidence, or at least reason, or are we going to continue like this?

Your arguments are irrelevant because they do not match my experiences. Are you telling me to disbelieve my eyes?

Yes, I participated in a clinical trial I only found though Facebook ads. Since clinical trials are very specific on who they are recruiting, it's a great use of targeted ads.

I also once bought soap that was advertised to me on Facebook. It's my go to brand of soap now.

I also read here on HN someone successfully using Facebook ads to target people planning on moving in their city to find an apartment before it reached the open market. EDIT: here it is, https://medium.com/good-signals/apartment-baiting-with-faceb...

Why do people always go on to the abstract cases when we are discussing a specific example?

> Where exactly does it stop?

It stops in cases when it's not protected and not breaking the law. Housing and job adverts cannot be explicitly descriminatory. It's a clear existing law. There is a clear line. You have to do your best and take precautions to avoid descrimination. When a platform doesn't do that then there's a problem.

> It stops in cases when it's not protected and not breaking the law.

Since we're discussing the scenarios that the law might cover, your claim seems rather circular.

> It's a clear existing law. There is a clear line.

The entire point of my post is that the line isn't neat and clear at all. Very similar concerns come up in various other contexts, and we as a society are going to have to deal with the internal contradictions of current orthodox thinking one way or another, and probably soon.

Your comment is just asserting that the problem I described doesn't exist. It does. Wishing away reality doesn't make it disappear.

Sure, but the point is Facebook should be taking minimum steps to actively avoid descrimination. It currently is not. Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good and they can do better.

I'm not sure people understand the inevitable progression here.

Step 1: HUD files a complaint against Facebook for allowing ad targeting based on certain criteria.

Step 2: Facebook bans advertising targeting based on the criteria in the HUD complaint.

Step 3: Advertisers react by targeting based on demographic correlates of the categories from step #1.

Step 4: HUD notices that ads are still getting delivered more to one group than another.

GOTO STEP #1.

There's no clear point at which this process stops. Demographic correlates are numerous and strong. Are you going to ban all of them? That's tantamount to banning ad targeting generally!

So what about your argument means they shouldn't handle the explicit descrimination cases on their platform better? Just because there might be a fuzzy case in they future why shouldn't they handle the clear cases now?

FYI these are the specific points they are going after:

-display housing ads either only to men or women;

-not show ads to Facebook users interested in an "assistance dog," "mobility scooter," "accessibility" or "deaf culture";

-not show ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in "child care" or "parenting," or show ads only to users with children above a specified age;

-to display/not display ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in a particular place of worship, religion or tenet, such as the "Christian Church," "Sikhism," "Hinduism," or the "Bible."

-not show ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in "Latin America," "Canada," "Southeast Asia," "China," "Honduras," or "Somalia."

-draw a red line around zip codes and then not display ads to Facebook users who live in specific zip codes.

Pretty damn clear: gender, race, disability and religion.

A lot of really bad policy gets enacted because advocates don't honestly ask themselves, "What are the foreseeable consequences of the policy I'm advocating?" That is, a failure to ask the question "And then what?" results in a lot of unnecessary misery.

Your comment essentially restates the HUD's complaint. It doesn't engage with my discussion of the fundamental incompatibility of the HUD's regulatory regime and ad targeting in general. Nobody was ever convinced of anything by someone typing "FYI: [restatement of original premise]".

My point was your premise is making up imaginary scenarios that aren't actually happening as a way of creating an issue with the clear problems outlined and this isn't helpful.

Creating an imaginary general problem as a way of attacking the specific issue is disingenuous.

More generally, housing discrimination will happen at the individual level in all sorts of subtle and not so subtle ways that can’t be generally stopped. That doesn’t mean you throw your hands up and say that we might as allow any sort of discrimination.

If the intent of policy X is to achieve goal Y and X does not in fact achieve Y, what is the point of continuing to pay the costs of X instead of proposing some X' that actually does achieve Y? Continuing to advocate X when X doesn't achieve Y suggests that the proponents of X don't really care about Y, but instead some unstated Z.

Because a simple and easily enforced X that hits 90% of cases is vastly preferable to the 1200 page tome that makes up X’ and requires 175k people to enforce after 20 years of law writing.

In some situations, "perfect is the enemy of the good" is a reasonable approach. Unfortunately, we're not dealing with a good-but-imperfect filter, but a practically useless filter, one that imposes significant costs on top of being ineffective.

"Weapons of Math Destruction" presents good evidence that 90% is much lower than the actual effectiveness of X.

The other person's reply to you was really this simple:

You are asserting a slippery-slope argument, but this is a situation where there are clear places this doesn't lead. It may be fuzzy instead of a clear line, but there's not actually a slippery slope necessarily. And you need to bear burden to show that there is a slippery slope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

Exactly. Thank you.

The slippy slope here is already in operation. It's the entire rationale behind prohibiting targeting based on zip code: demographics change from zip code to zip code, so the HUD concludes that targeting by zip code is de facto targeting by demographic.

What logical basis is there for stopping at zip code targeting and not applying the same logic to other demographic correlates?

> The slippy slope here is already in operation.

Except there are 40 years of court decisions clarifying how the law should be interpreted.

Most of the case law dates from before internet advertising microtargeting. We're in novel legal territory here.

That said, it's possible that a forward-thinking court has already resolved the question under discussion. Can you point me to case law that discusses the boundary between discriminatory and non-discriminatory ad targeting based on demographic correlates?

The fact it’s an online entity may or may not be novel (I imagine Craig’s List has been sued over this).

I meant my comment to refer to the idea of a slippery slope on what does/does not count as a discriminatory. There is lots of case law on that.

I think it’s safe to say if a court has previous rules you can’t put ‘No X’ or ‘Y only’ in a newspaper ads you can use t as a filter for ad targeting.

The FHA is a 50 year old law. Facebook isn't getting in trouble for offering targeted advertising, they're getting in trouble for allowing explicit discrimination on the basis of sex and ethnicity. This has nothing to do with correlations.

Anything that sabotages advertising, especially ad-tech, is a positive thing for the world.

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