Facebook provided only a tool. Nobody is after hardware store because a hammer bought there was used to kill someone.
...it shall be unlawful—
(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.
>or cause to be made...
Key words here.
Sure, the government should be going after individual advertisers too, but selective prosecution or not, Facebook is clearly in violation.
They probably will.
But in this instance it’s much more appropriate the end FBs illegal business practices, rather than continuing to go after ad creators in perpetuity. Turn off the water and fix the leak instead of catching the drops, similar theory to local police flipping low level drug dealers to go after the suppliers.
Facebook is just the hardware store in this sense. They provide tools. And you make the billboard. They did not cause this to be made.
edit: They still may be responsible for publishing it, which is illegal. I would think its a much better argument to go after them for that then the 'cause' to be made' argument.
edit: ah. tunnel vision. yes the other parts of the statute would cover FB as partially culpable here. particularly the 'publish' part.
"To make, print, or publish, or cause to be made, printed, or published"
Nobody would consider forcing hammer manufactures to police their customers not to hurt people with said hammers either
If the ad selection tools are unfit for purpose -- say because it allows a user to target/untarget recipients in a blatantly illegal manner -- that's the company's fault.
Can we agree to this compromise?
Also likely the reason you'll start to see a shift over time in Facebook and Google's business models. They won't just allow any old thing on their servers any more.
Sort of like CBS or Fox can and do decide what kind of ads they would or they would not air.
I think Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc are going to find out that by being a publisher one has to actually act as a publisher all the time and not just when it is convenient.
Facebook caused the advertisements to not show for protected groups. The "tools" ran on their servers, not yours, so they are responsible for the outcome.
This comes up rather often but the "disruptor economy" style business that try and replace existing things that are burdened by regulations and other boring things with shiny new things with Vue, rounded corners, blinking lights and a lack of those regulations are, in fact, totally responsible for their failure to adhere to those regulations.
I feel like D&D and friends are ultimately partially to blame here, and their long (and wonderful, I'm not knocking table top RPGs) history of encouraging pedantic rules lawyering. The US legal code isn't like a tabletop RPG where if nothing specifically says your Thri-Kreen can't quadra-wield bastard swords with monkey grip then go ahead - when laws fail to specifically address situations then the courts are present to try and sanely interpret the intent of the original law and apply it to the new situation.
That's sort of like how murder is illegal, instead of it being illegal to hit someone on the head with a garbage can, hit someone on the head with a tire iron, hit someone on the head with a crow bar... "Murder" isn't an action you can take without a lot of abstract assumptions.
So perhaps Facebook is like a hardware store that sells the...
Burgler Bundle - a complete set of a ski-mask, crow bar, knife and lockpick set
(do note "Burgler Bundles" are not intended for burglery, theft, larceny
or other crimes, by purchasing the markers of the "Burgler Bundle"
are hereby absolved of responsibility for any law breaking committed)
Using your analogy, when you buy a hammer you don't tell the cashier it's for murder.
Same goes for billboards. Suburbs? Subway? The highway 2 towns over?
Print media, TV time...the list goes on.
13 states (California, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Wisconsin) and DC consider "source of income" a basis for a protected class, and so you probably couldn't target ads in those states based on that, but I don't see anything that would cover wealth level rather than wealth source.
(Neat site with a nice way to look up which state protects what [1])
Since you can have a wealth requirement for renting (e.g., you can require that the person be able to afford the rent), there wouldn't be much point in prohibiting targeting based on that.
[1] http://lawatlas.org/datasets/state-fair-housing-protections-...
Indeed they should. This is basically like going after the phone company because somebody else was using number prefixes as a proxy for race. Even though this is a fundamental property of any system that doesn't explicitly preclude such targeting, Facebook already took steps to limit this type of discrimination in ads for housing or credit. That was good enough for the ACLU, Fair Housing Alliance, and others who have a sincere interest in the matter. It should have been good enough for HUD too, which brings us to the real crux of the matter.
Sufficiency of the new limits on targeting was not the sticking point between Facebook and HUD. The sticking point was HUD's demand for all user data, without any safeguards. It's a fishing expedition. What would HUD do with that data? It's not a stretch to believe they'd use it to further this administration's own discriminatory agenda. HUD is not fighting against discrimination at all. They're on the other side of that battle. Rejecting their demand was IMO the right thing to do.
Facebook creates the market for these types of targeted advertising to exist, and they should have at least a basic understanding of the laws and not permit companies to advertise to certain demographics when it would be in clear violation of the law.
That's like saying, oh we were too oblivious to understand how the platform we created could be used while we still profited significantly from our mistakes in the meantime.
Your analogy is faulty.
People, governments, and law enforcement agencies go after gun stores that sell guns that are used to kill people.
Also, note the "kill people" phrase in the message you're responding to, and the context of this conversation: committing crimes.
s/hammer/gun/ and you'll find some who are. Not agreeing or disagreeing, only raising the point that some people do seem to judge different tools by different standards based on some criteria that is not immediately visible/available to me.
???
That must've just been Virginia? Where I lived in Houston, they listed unacceptable races all the time. (I suppose they didn't have to though, it was always the same two races listed.)
Definitely going to need a citation for this. I grew up in Houston and never saw an add specifying "unacceptable races" -- perhaps 50+ years ago maybe. My parents were in the rental business and we spent a lot of time looking at (and placing) ads -- never was race listed on an ad that I've ever seen for as long as I can remember (since the mid 1980s.) That doesn't mean it didn't happen, but there'll need to be some proof that the practice was widespread or common if you're to come on a forum and essentially libel a city as racist.
Calm down guy.
The original comment was saying that, in Virginia, ...CRAIGSLIST... would not openly mention the desired or unacceptable races for rentals. My only point was that, again, CRAIGSLIST ads certainly did have desired or unacceptable races listed in Houston.
The fact is it's happened in Houston Craigslist, just as it's happened in Craigslist in lots of other places in the nation. There was a class action, as well as several individual lawsuits, filed. My memory is hazy, but I believe Craigslist prevailed in all of this on the fact that they were acting only as a provider of publishing services and not a publisher themselves??? (Not really sure about Craigslist winning, but I seem to remember that they did. In any case, it's easily Google-able if you're really that curious as to whether or not all of this really happened.)
In other words, the comment is about Craigslist. Houston and Virginia are incidental to the story of what was happening, all across the nation, on Craigslist at the time.
Also, come on man, I lived in Houston. For a long time. A time period that, coincidentally, saw me doing a lot of renting. (And using Craigslist to do so, because that's what you did in those days.) Houston Craigslist was certainly not magically immune to this issue. I was there. I saw it. Further, the fact that there were lawsuits all around the nation makes me feel confident in saying that this was very likely not a problem limited to Houston.
I'll take at face value your assertion that YOUR parents didn't post discriminatory ads. That said, the point of fact that discriminatory ads were placed on Craigslist on a systemic and nationwide scale was not in question in any of these lawsuits. The only question was, "Was Craigslist responsible?" Put another way, even the government, courts, and lawyers all across the US agree that racist ads were placed in Craigslist all across the nation. All parties accepted that as fact based on the evidence. They simply disagree on who was responsible.
So I'm not really sure why you're trying to say that racist ads never appeared in Houston like they did everyplace else? My sense is that you believe what you're saying, so my head is telling me that you must not have lived in the social strata of people who had to check Craigslist for cheap apartments or new roommates.
Either you're the one reacting strongly or you're the one chiding people for doing so. Doing both is poor form, to an extent that it stops mattering what else you type.