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Comment by yardie | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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.

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

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

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