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Comment by LanceH | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.)

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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?

> 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...

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.

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?

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!

there needs to be a dmca for ads.

What does that mean? Who's copying ads?

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