17 ms·

I'm no fan of Facebook or discrimination, and am happy to see this pursued by the federal government, but I personally would gladly be excluded from all ads, ra

I'm no fan of Facebook or discrimination, and am happy to see this pursued by the federal government, but I personally would gladly be excluded from all ads, ranging from billboards to search results to food packaging. I guess what I'm thinking is, if Facebook had a feature (maybe it does, I'm not a user) allowing members to search housing classifieds, and if that feature allowed listing agents to discriminate against who saw their listings in results, that would be straight up bullshit. But, AFAIK, anyone can anonymously search different housing listing platforms for available housing wherever they want to live, so I guess I'm just struggling to see how housing advertising is worth this sort of scrutiny at all. Again, I stress that discrimination is fucked and I'm happy to see something being done about it on any level, at all. I just feel like there are surely bigger fish to fry and spending resources on pursuing to whom/how ads are delivered doesn't seem like the best investment.

rtkwe 8y ago
The issue here is that Facebook is explicitly allowing the property owners to make discriminatory housing ads. It doesn't matter how many other sources there are because publishers are also forbidden from making discriminatory ads in the law. In the end they're going to have to either stop allowing housing ads or remove any filtering for those ads that relate to a protected class (including any fine grained geographic filters too probably because those turn into a racial proxy pretty quickly) and anything that's a significant proxy for something like race.