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Comment by air7 | Hacker News Reader

While true, its a bit of a nitpick and misses the point GP made.

No. If you place an ad on Facebook for housing and choose to exclude people who identify as "black", there's no way for those people to find your ad, save for creating a new Facebook account and pretending to be white.

Anyone is welcome to purchase a copy of Ebony magazine. It's targeted, but it's not exclusive.

Is it really any better to make people choose just really good proxies for their intended audience which theoretically anyone could be a member of but in practice is not that way?

And if this isn’t really any better, where does that leave you?

Where else would you draw the line? I don't think what I described is a real problem in practice. Housing and jobs are often advertised in rather neutral publications, not special interest ones. But what Facebook enables goes beyond targeting based on interest, it's explicitly exclusionary.

If your local newspaper could print a special edition for minority subscribers that didn't include job listings, that would be a problem. Advertising in a special interest publication is not, on its own, a problem. Of course there's no clear lines in reality, everything must be evaluated in context.

But should Ebony be allowed to market ads on Facebook and exclude white people? I honestly don’t know where I come down on this issue: it feels different to say, “we have a better ROI if we exclude certain demographics from seeing our ads” than to say “black people can’t eat at this diner.”

Let’s take a company like REI: is it wrong for them to put their stores in places that are most profitable? Should luxury good companies be required to have store fronts in inner cities?

I’m legitimately not sure I’m comfortable with either answer. “Women / older people are unlikely to respond to this ad; so we’ll have a better ROI by excluding those groups” feels awkward but like a legitimate business interest. If I sell male hygiene products can I exclude women from seeing the ads, not because I don’t like women but because the ad is less likely to be relevant?

“I don’t want to work with women or older people so I’ll not show them the ad” feels unquestionably wrong.

The short answer is: it depends. I don't think you'll run into much trouble in excluding women from your ads for beard care products, but you might of you're excluding them from your ads for housing.

I think you have to consider intent as well as outcome.

There is no might there are specific laws governing advertising when it comes to jobs and housing that don’t apply to other areas.

> But should Ebony be allowed to market ads on Facebook and exclude white people?

That's not what this thread is about. The question here is what is the difference between advertising on Facebook and excluding some demographics, and advertising in a paper magazine where you don't have the power to exclude anyone from viewing the ad.

Um.. I think most luxury goods stores are in inner cities.

Magazine buyer's aren't a protected class.

not really, because people are aware of the fact that they're going to find say, women targeted ads in cosmo, so they can seek them out. The 'discrimination' in this case is simply aggregate consumer preference, every individual outlier still gets precisely the content and ads they want.

If facebook displays housing ads only to white people a black person is very likely not even aware that they're being discriminated against in some specific way, the entire control is in the hands of facebook and the ad buyer, and intransparent.

The situation would be equivalent if facebook gave you complete control over their algorithm and let you choose what type of ads you want to be exposed to. Which would make discrimination much less of an issue. Or the other way around, the current facebook situation would be akin to the store owner quickly cutting the housing ads out of cosmo as soon as black people walk into the store.

I think that's the main reason why buying an ad in Cosmo is different from buying a targeted Facebook ad in terms of discrimination. Cosmo might be written with women in mind but anybody can go and buy it. But it's pretty much impossible for someone who identifies as a man on Facebook to see ads that are only targeted towards women. The Facebook example is more similar to a real estate agent who only shows certain properties to white families.

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