The Trump Administration’s New Facebook Lawsuit Is a Trojan Horse
A former attorney at Facebook explains
Imagine crafting an ad only for white people. Maybe you narrow down the targeting to a certain location and slice out certain ages for good measure. That might make sense if you’re trying to sell a cream-colored foundation in your Manhattan boutique, but you’d be ill-advised to try it for advertising housing or jobs — because it’s against the law.
And yet, in 2016, a ProPublica report detailed the ability to use an “ethnic affinity” option in Facebook’s self-service ad tool, allowing businesses to micro-target advertisements based on a variety of immutable demographic categories. A real estate company could use this tool to show ads for available properties only to certain races or gender.
That’s illegal according to the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which clearly prohibits “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.” At the time of ProPublica’s initial investigation, Facebook said it would update its ad-targeting product but hadn’t as of November 2017, when ProPublica published a follow-up article. Then, in 2018, the ACLU filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission…
