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Comment by sacheendra | Hacker News Reader

This case was about targeted ads for housing, credit cards, etc. You can't target people of a gender or color for such things by law.

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Facebook already forbade using those categories for targeting ads for those things:

> For over a year, we have required advertisers we identify offering housing, employment or credit ads to certify compliance with our non-discrimination policy.

It looks to me like they're removing this as an option for all types of ads:

> We’re committed to protecting people from discriminatory advertising on our platforms. That’s why we’re removing over 5,000 targeting options to help prevent misuse. While these options have been used in legitimate ways to reach people interested in a certain product or service, we think minimizing the risk of abuse is more important. This includes limiting the ability for advertisers to exclude audiences that relate to attributes such as ethnicity or religion.

Facebook forbade those only after reports. There were further issues followed by ACLU which ended in agreement that requries further changes.

Chain of events: 1.) A series of investigative reports over the past two years have uncovered ways that users can abuse Facebook's ad platform in order to discriminate against some populations, mainly people of color, when it comes to certain marketing for certain opportunities, like housing, employment or credit.

2.) Following the reports, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) filed a complaint against Facebook [...], charging that the social network allows advertisers to illegally discriminate in housing ads by excluding some groups from seeing the ads.

3.) Shortly after, Facebook removed over 5,000 ad-targeting options to prevent that capability.

4.) In September, the ACLU and its law firm, representing the Communications Workers of America and several individual job seekers, filed charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Facebook and a number of employers, alleging that they had unlawfully discriminated against certain populations via their ad targeting platform.

5.) As part of the settlement, Facebook will pay $5 million to several groups, [...] It will also take three new steps to prevent advertisers from engaging in unlawful discrimination around employment, housing, and credit ads on Facebook and its subsidiaries (Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger, etc.):archive for housing ads,

"It will also take three new steps to prevent advertisers from engaging in unlawful discrimination around employment, housing, and credit ads on Facebook. [..] As part of this process, Facebook is further cutting the number of options advertisers [in housing, employment, credit] can use to target ads"

For housing, would it make sense that an apartment complex inside a Chinese community targets ads on Chinese speakers, who are much more likely to live in there? Is this considered as discrimination based on color?

What if the landlord only speaks Chinese?

One of the goals of the law is to hinder ethnic ghettoization like that.

An ethnically homogenous area doesn't always imply it's a ghetto though?

The original meaning of "ghetto" was to be ethnically homogenous, it gained the additional meaning of being ramshackle or of poor condition.

Why should it be the goal of the law to hinder prosperous but ethnically homogenous areas? Personally I like my diverse neighborhood, but I also like that Chinatown is just down the street.

Because the reality of racial restriction covenants and redlining practices is that they weren't used to develop great locales; they were used to systemically exclude people of undesired races who otherwise had the means to live in said area.

This doesn't mean that ethic areas just melt away, though. Chinatown can remain Chinatown on the basis that they value being close to Chinese community centres and Chinese grocery stores more than the average resident, meaning they're willing to pay more and price out other people to live there. They can't remain Chinatown by literally refusing to rent to someone because they're black, though.

This allows ethic areas to remain if they provide a benefit to their community, but melt away to redistribute real-estate resources more efficiently if they don't.

isn't the point of things like rent control and affordable housing to specifically prevent people from paying more and pricing out people who want to live there?

It comes down to this issue of whether or not more housing is available. In New York, there's effectively a finite cap on housing, so you can't just say "well buy somewhere else". Pricing caps and assistance programs make sense there, but those also come with less ability to control your neighborhood.

When there's tons of cheap housing available, then having small areas with expensive pricing isn't per se a problem (but could be an issue in context, say a small midwestern town excluding black people from buying houses by over-inflating prices.)

>you can't just say "well buy somewhere else"

You can, for the most part, if you don't make it harder than it needs to be to build apartment complexes.

You can't put 256GB of ram in your desktop and expect it to run faster.

You can't replace one house with 16 apartments and expect it to work as well.

Parking, noise, litter, etc. It's not fair for a developer to push their direct costs onto the neighborhood instead of eating it themselves.

The answer is obviously contingent on your values and maybe your prediction of sociological outcomes.

It's important to notice that this is as pure as racism gets. I mean, why shouldn't you be able to ethnically cleanse a place if the landlords prefer a white clientele?

It's racist to advertise to the group that is most likely to buy your product? And advertising is equivalent to ethnic cleansing? This hyperbole is ridiculous.

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