Facebook Users Sue Over Alleged Racial Discrimination In Housing, Job Ads (arstechnica.com)

In response to a report from ProPublica alleging that Facebook gives advertisers the ability to exclude specific groups it calls "Ethnic Affinities," three Facebook users have filed a lawsuit against the company. They are accusing the social networking giant of violating the Federal Housing Act of 1964 over its alleged discriminatory policies. Ars Technica reports: ProPublica managed to post an ad placed in Facebook's housing categories that excluded anyone with an "affinity" for African-American, Asian-American, or Hispanic people. When the ProPublica reporters showed the ad to prominent civil rights lawyer John Relman, he described it as "horrifying" and "as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find." According to the proposed class-action lawsuit, by allowing such ads on its site, Facebook is in violation of the landmark civil rights legislation, which specifically prohibits housing advertisements to discriminate based on race, gender, color, religion, and other factors. "This lawsuit does not seek to end Facebook's Ad Platform, nor even to get rid of the "Exclude People" mechanism. There are legal, desirable uses for such functionalities. Plaintiffs seek to end only the illegal proscribed uses of these functions," the lawyers wrote in the civil complaint, which was filed last Friday. The proposed class, if approved by a federal judge in San Francisco, would include any Facebook user in the United States who has "not seen an employment- or housing-related advertisement on Facebook within the last two years because the ad's buyer used the Ad Platform's 'Exclude People' functionality to exclude the class member based on race, color, religion, sex, familial status, or national origin."

Comments

Canary in the coal mine

[ScentCone]

This sort of crap is exactly how we end up with (for example) the likely next president saying she wants to make gun manufacturers liable for the criminal use of their products. Issues like that sound like single-topic voter hot buttons, but they're not. The instinct to look for the nearest deep(er) pockets and blame the existence of a tool for how someone else uses it ... that's the sort of thing that this election is all about. Because this election is really about the Supreme Court.