How is Facebook allegedly violated fair housing laws
Facebook has recently being charged by the Department of Housing and Urban Development with violating fair housing laws by allowing stakeholders such as housing developers to discriminate in their housing advertisement targeting practices based on race, national origin, lifestyle, family status, and more — this way, effectively excluding some groups. This piece of news comes only a week after Facebook settled for similar charges with other advocacy groups for an amount nearing $5 million. As a response to both charges, Facebook has compromised to remove “age, gender and ZIP Code targeting for housing, employment and credit-related advertisements”, as well as building a “tool to let people search for its housing ads in the U.S.” (Daniel Nasaw, 2019).
How does Facebook does this? It leverages data machine learning algorithms to learn about their audience and then allowed stakeholders to discriminate in their targeting.
As CNN indicates, “a ProPublica and New York Times investigation found that dozens of major companies ran recruitment ads only for specific age groups.” And “Another ProPublica report in November 2017 found discriminatory ads were making it through Facebook’s systems. ProPublica was able to purchase dozens of home-rental ads that specifically excluded ‘African American, mothers of high school kids, people interested in wheelchair ramps, Jews, expats form Argentina and Spanish speakers” (Kaya Yurieff, 2019).
Sources
Daniel Nasaw. “Facebook Charged With Violating Fair Housing Laws. Wallstreet Journal. 2019. https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-charges-facebook-with-violating-fair-housing-laws-11553775078?mod=wsj_rochester2
Kaya Yurieff. “HUD charges Facebook with housing discrimination in ads”. CNN. 2019. https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/28/tech/facebook-hud-ad-discrimination/index.html
