Facebook Still Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race

https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-discrimination-housing-race-sex-national-origin

by topspin • 9 years ago

131 94 9 years ago

apk-d• 9 years ago

Is there a non-negligible fraction of ads that do this for this to be an actual problem? Or is it another article riding the wave of the media crusade against Facebook? Genuine question, I don't have a Facebook account and I live in a country rather separated from the racial discrimination concerns present in the US.

creaghpatr• 9 years ago

I think the main beef is with PACs targeting political ads by race.

michaelbuckbee• 9 years ago

Facebook doesn't publish what interest categories and demographics go into their ads (aka you can't click on an ad in FB and see what led to it being shown to you).

But we're talking billions of dollars a year in ads, of which real estate is a respectable percentage (FB is very good at doing geographic targeting).

And you certainly also have these relatively unsupervised and opaque "interest categories" that are being presented to advertisers.

gcatalfamo2• 9 years ago

Recognizing race does not equal being racist at all, imho.

I don't want to live in a society where I can't objectively (in no bad way whatsoever) acknowledge trait differences, whether they be skin colour or hair length.

stevenmays• 9 years ago

I think the issue here is the possibility of digital red-lining. While recognizing race is not racist, treating people differently because of their race is racist.

w0m• 9 years ago

Not necessarily - not showing African Americans spray-tan advertisements as an example - is that racist?

sologoub4• 9 years ago

Differentiation is not the same as discrimination. The protected categories exist because harm was done on the basis of these identifiable traits.

If all humanbeings were ethical and always did the right thing (which matched the universally shared definition of the right thing), we wouldn't need these laws. Since neither the universally accepted definition or the universally ethical people exist, we are stuck with the flawed legal system. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make it better though.

npstr5• 9 years ago

There is no such thing as a "universally right thing", and not even laws can force it into existence.

Rotten194• 9 years ago

Do you really not think that only allowing certain races to rent houses isn't racist? Please google redlining.

gcatalfamo2• 9 years ago

Of course that's racist, but I was referring to recognizing race, not if such ability were to be used for redlining which is despicable.

volgo2• 9 years ago

Why? You can set difference prices for age, gender, and profession when it comes to insurance products because different demographics have different risk. What's so different about race?

whistlerbrk• 9 years ago

Re-read the parent comment, you are in agreement.

UncleMeat• 9 years ago

Sucks to be a black person in such a society, though. For no reason other than their skin color they are lumped in with a group of people lower average prosperity and then are denied access to resources and systems because of this grouping. Especially when these disparities are themselves caused by a history of deliberate oppression. How convenient that we get to continue to perpetuate inequalities that were themselves caused by the group in the majority. The grouping itself is a problem and produces false or misleading ideas about individuals.

Men are far more likely to commit violent crimes than women. Should employers and landlords be able to blanket deny access to men?

npstr5• 9 years ago

Employers and landlords should be able to deny access to anyone they please. It's their company and their property, after all.

joelrunyon8• 9 years ago

Men are far more likely to commit violent crimes than women. Should employers and landlords be able to blanket deny access to men?

No, but they're more likely to get in more car wrecks, and I have to pay a higher insurance premium because guys on average are worse drivers.

ikeyany• 9 years ago

This is a topic that HN is particularly tone deaf on. Bringing this up tends to be seen as an attack on white or Asian people.

joelrunyon8• 9 years ago

I'm really confused because it seems most people haven't used these tools.

In reality, people respond better to people that look like them in ads. People talk about this all the time when talking about "representation."

Say you have a housing and want to target "families" -

It's probably smart to create the following ad groups:

* White families

* Black families

* Hispanic families

* Mixed families

* And however many more depending on ad group size.

Then you'd create a specific ad using images that reflect those families. That's pretty standard online ad management + part of the reason why so much spend has shifted online - it can be a lot more precise.

Sure, you could get one image and blanket target everyone, but I would bet your ROI gets beat by the above strategy.

frgtpsswrdlame• 9 years ago

Is that not just the tech equivalent of "Separate but Equal"?

ghaff• 9 years ago

That's true, but the article describes something that goes a step further. You don't even show ads to certain groups. Now, I'll agree that the distinction between having targeted ads and having targeted ads where one of the targets is basically No Ad starts to look like an odd distinction.

Furthermore pre-digital, no one would have had any serious issue in only running ads in publications known to have specific readership demographics. (Like "families" which itself is a demographic.)

And no one would have issues if these were ads targeted at specific blogs or other sites with a demographic different from almost everyone like Facebook is.

rhizome• 9 years ago

It's probably smart to create the following ad groups

Why?

Then you'd create a specific ad using images that reflect those familiar.

How much better performing are ads that display a demographic than those that display a mix? Isn't this essentially pandering to racial prejudices? "We only want our ads to be seen by people who value skin color."

You suggest a bet on ROI, have you previously done this research?

InclinedPlane2• 9 years ago

Once again, for the people in the back:

This would be fine, if our country didn't have a horrific history of oppressive and violent racism that resulted in the immiseration of millions upon millions of individuals, many of them American citizens.

We have that history, we are still struggling under the weight of that history (some more than others, of course), and that is why we "can't have nice things".

Think of it this way, there's a lava flow running right next to the village you live in, which means you have to be careful not to do things that would get people killed. Sure, this can be restrictive at times, but, you know, there's frickin' lava. Right. There. For some reason a lot of people (they tend to have something in common, not sure what) don't see the entrenched institutionalized racism in this country, nor do they seem to consider it a serious problem. It is one of the most serious problems that continues to face this country, and historians are going to damn us (yes us, you, me, all of us) for not having dealt with it properly for far too long. Concerns like the effectiveness of advertisements are so far down the rungs compared to this problem that they aren't worth caring about.

skissane• 9 years ago

But "race" isn't actually the same thing as "skin colour or hair length".

"Race" is really a social/cultural concept, it is specific to a particular country/society.

Most official forms in the US seem to believe humans can be classified into five races: "White", "Black or African American", "American Indian or Alaska Native", "Asian", "Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander"

(Source: https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html )

None of those categories bears a straightforward relation to physical characteristics. e.g. "Asian" includes a wide range of skin tones, from quite pale to quite dark.

And only Americans categorise humans in this way. Other countries either categorise them differently, or eschew racial classification entirely. e.g. "Asian" in the UK has a narrower meaning than it does in the US.

egwynn3• 9 years ago

    ... objectively (in no bad way whatsoever) acknowledge
    trait differences ...

This is like the "frictionless surface" of sociology. It sure sounds like a great thing to shoot for, but our laws carry centuries (if not millennia) of cultural baggage along with them. It's nigh impossible to craft policies that aim only at the ideal, and ignore people's heavy emotional priors (e.g., if you're a person of race A who grew up amidst feelings of animosity towards people of race B that were brought on by centuries of physical and emotional trauma).

scarface744• 9 years ago

There is a historical context to why the fair housing act was instituted. For example, I am a minority that lives in a county that was infamous for being "whites only" just 30 years ago.

InclinedPlane2• 9 years ago

Sorry, there are limits to how far that is allowed to go. As with so many things, bad actors ruin things for everyone else, forcing onerous rules, regulations, and laws to prevent their bad actions from having too great a negative impact on society as a whole. We tried it the "let's just let things sort themselves out" way, and it didn't work, to the detriment of massive negative impact on the lives of people of color specifically. It's important to realize that it doesn't take a majority of white society to create a preference cascade which is horribly exclusionary toward non-whites, that's why we have the laws the way they are.

sologoub4• 9 years ago

Can any attorney with knowledge of fair housing weigh in on this? Law quotes states that the ad cannot say these things, but the publishing of an ad in a medium targeted based on these seems like a relatively new ground, since the ad itself is likely fine, but how it is distributed is definitely not in the spirit of the law.

In finance, I'm fairly sure zip+4 is off limits in many pricing models for this exact reason - it is too specific. However, I'm not aware of anything like this in advertising publishing that a given ad has to have a chance of being seen regardless of the protected categories.

Regardless of the law, it's definitely extremely unethical to do this.

paulddraper2• 9 years ago

It's not new ground, nor do I believe it to be necessarily unethical.

People can and do advertise in predominantly white settings or black settings, e.g. a church or a sports game or a magazine.

Advertising has always, always, always been a numbers game. Didn't advertise on billboards in the middle of Wyoming? Maybe because there was lower ROI than elsewhere.

dudul• 9 years ago

Do these laws really yield results?

If somebody doesn't want to rent to or hire a person of a certain race they just won't. They may be forced to not be specific in their ad, but in the end they still won't call you back.

djohnston• 9 years ago

Right... This is basically what happens in a neighborhood like Chinatown, where they can't explicitly deny you because you aren't Chinese but you won't be signing a lease any time soon. Maybe it's because I'm currently reading "The Sellout," but I don't think that it's universally bad to have a practice like that. I don't want Chinatown to be filled with white people. It's different when the people being denied housing actually can't find housing anywhere because the practice is so ubiquitous.

jacalata3• 9 years ago

For a single person renting out one house, they will get away with it. But for an apartment complex, they can get investigated and have secret shoppers come in and then they get in trouble for not treating the two marker customers the same.

joelrunyon8• 9 years ago

If people keep following the logical end of this, then facebook and google's entire business model is going to implode on itself.

All of online marketing is basically segmenting populations by various group traits. It says nothing about the individual, but as a marketer you think in those broad categories that maybe, just maybe different ages, races, locations might respond differently to ads.

jacalata3• 9 years ago

Are you using the slippery slope fallacy to argue against the existence of federal protected classes?

rednerrus• 9 years ago

Isn't the argument one about targeting ads to the right people? I don't need to see ads online for statin drugs. Should drug manufacturers be required to show their statin drug ads to me?

joelrunyon8• 9 years ago

Nope.

I'm just saying that if you remove the ability to target ads based on specific person characteristics, you remove a piece of what makes fb so valuable of an advertising platform (that is to target people so microscopically).

Just pointing it out.

cortesoft4• 9 years ago

I am pretty sure those two companies don't have their entire business model revolving around housing, so I am not sure where you think the logical end of this is going to be.

scarface744• 9 years ago

Unless all ads are for real estate where there are specific laws about how you can and cannot sell houses, I don't see the relevance.

tareqak• 9 years ago

Techmeme summary: ProPublica: Ads for housing that exclude demographics are still being approved by Facebook, a year after a study highlighted the illegal discriminatory practice on Facebook

lopatin• 9 years ago

And that's not all, I hear they're still letting make-up advertisers to exclude users by gender.

egwynn3• 9 years ago

The text of the law[0] is surprisingly clear that FB's acceptance of these ads is illegal (unless I'm missing something big).

    As made applicable by section 3603 of this title and except as exempted by
    sections 3603(b) and 3607 of this title, 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.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/3604#c

RandallBrown• 9 years ago

The ads aren't discriminating are they?

This seems identical to posting paper ads in primarily white neighborhoods, which I don't think is illegal.

To me the issue is that Facebook said they fixed this, and they haven't.

superchink• 9 years ago

See, I didn't read it that way.

"…that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination…"

If the ad itself does not mention the preference, then it does not seem to be covered by this clause.

Would it not be analogous to advertising the property to a particular racial or religious group, such as a church bulletin board?

The distribution of the ad is being targeted, but the ad itself does not indicate any preference. It seems as if the latter is the only thing that is deemed illegal by the law.

Am I reading it correctly?

Lukeas14• 9 years ago

I agree it doesn't seem to violate the letter of this particular law.

But it's close to being the digital version of redlining. Before the Fair Housing Act real estate brokers would show certain houses only to white clients and other houses only to clients of color. That was explicitly deemed illegal. If you see real estate brokers as a medium through which sellers would advertise their houses I don't see how this is much different.

egwynn3• 9 years ago

I think you're right, but I'm not sure I'm wrong... yet.

First, I think I misinterpreted paragraph C w.r.t. how it applies to the ads themselves. I think you're right here, that the ads aren't illegal, since they don't do any discriminating in and of themselves.

However, the text of the law seems to say that placing the order for the ads may be illegal. Placing the order would seem to constitute the making of a statement (with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling) that indicates a preference (or intention to make that preference) based on race. I realize that might feel like way too low a bar, but it seems to fit.

IANAL, but that's how it seems to me.

canadianwriter• 9 years ago

This is about the ads themselves I believe, which these ones are fine.

If this applied to targeting wouldn't it mean I can't target only women for my feminine hygiene product? Therefor wasting insane amounts showing ads to men for a product only women need.

brycesub• 9 years ago

This is part of the fair housing act, it applies specifically to housing, not other retail products.

cortesoft4• 9 years ago

Are those women going to live in your feminine hygiene product? If not, I am not sure how housing law is applicable to your advertisement?

Balgair• 9 years ago

Not to de-rail the thread, but man, FB's slide here has been fast. Just about 1 year ago we were talking about 'fake news' as a threat separate from FB. FB was still considered 'neutral' at worst, if not a 'good' thing.

Now? It seems like everyone hates them. Not that they are doing themselves favors at all, but them and Uber are downright villains now.

koliber• 9 years ago

Someone explained to me a while ago, in New York State, it was illegal to discriminate on race, color, religion, sex, etc. for renting out apartments in 3+ unit dwellings.

As an owner of a single home, renting out the upstairs apartment, it was supposedly perfectly OK to discriminate based on those things.

I never dug into this, but if it is true, the question is: "Should Facebook ad tools facilitate such discrimination, even if it is not forbidden by law?".

extra88• 9 years ago

It's this federal law the Fair Housing Act, not state law, that has an exception for smaller properties where the owner lives (New York may further extend federal protections). The exception only allows discrimination in not allowing someone to live there, it's still illegal to advertise in a discriminatory way.

https://fairhousing.foxrothschild.com/2010/06/articles/fha-b...

ggg9990• 9 years ago

They can just advertise to people who like Bing Crosby instead.

Facebook Still Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race

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