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HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

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Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#151

Post by AdamM12 »

AdamM12 wrote: post #127
Maybestring wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should. Allowing large commercial entities to facilitilate discrimination and only going after individual landlords would be an extremely inefficient use of limited resources.

The inefficiency of the process shouldn't be a deciding factor. Should be the justness of it. Facebook isn't discriminating. We don't punish shipping companies when their resources are used for drug smuggling. We punish the individuals involved in the illicit act. edit: Not entirely sure how arguing that our system should be a just one more so than one that goes after what is easiest is getting down voted so much but…

Facebook isn't a party to a potential rental contract or contract to sale. They aren't in a position to deny someone housing.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#152

Post by reaperducer »

dnautics wrote: post #126
austincheney wrote: post #31

Here are the likely relevant laws in question: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Housing_Act * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 By law you cannot discriminate by any designation of protected class, which includes not only parties to a business transaction but also messaging and opportunities there upon. I do understand why Facebook would allow ad display filtering by race and other demographi…

Of course Facebook should allow racial filtering. Not understanding this is a fundamental failure to understand minority businesses. Let's say hypothetically you're selling a product that is highly ethnically selected, like beauty products (before any criticism keep in mind that the first self made American female millionaire, cj walker made her fortune on beauty products) - should you be forced to buy advertising im…

Of course Facebook should allow racial filtering. Not understanding this is a fundamental failure to understand minority businesses.

This isn't about makeup, or placing ads in a targeted magazine like Ebony. It's about real estate and housing, and the laws governing that kind of advertising are well-established and very clear.

I worked briefly in large multi-unit housing, and got some of the training related to this sort of thing (though not specifically to advertising).

We were taught that if you're showing an apartment building to someone, you can't ask their age. You can't ask if they have children. You can't ask if they're pregnant.

You can't even do seemingly innocent things like ask a woman who is pregnant or visiting with children if she'd prefer a unit near the playground. Or suggest a ground-floor unit to a person in a wheelchair, even if the building doesn't have an elevator.

Maybe it was just this company's lawyer's overreactions to the law, or perhaps the company had previous bad experiences in this area. But we were given dozens of similar scenarios and those who answered even one incorrectly had to go through enhanced training.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#153

Post by [deleted] »

MBCook wrote: post #148
quotemstr wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your use of the phrase "it's a start" suggests that further restrictions will follow.

No, it implies that they at least appeared to be trying, even if it wasn’t very effective. As it is they don’t seem to have put in the smallest possible effort to comply and decided to ignore the law completely.

[deleted]

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#154

Post by MBCook »

toddsiegel wrote: post #40
google_censors wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's actually something called "disparate impact" in Fair Housing that covers this. So if someone does something like that, especially intentionally, and it impacts a protected class, they can be sued and fined.

In fact, since most cases are not so blatantly obvious as this, using disparate impact is often how these cases are brought.

If only FB had an insane amount of data that could trivially be used to figure out if a given criteria would have a disparate impact.

I can’t imag them fighting this, theyvseem so unlikely to win.

But then again, I’m surprised corporate counsel wasn’t screaming about this. It’s not the first time I’ve read about this and I don’t work there.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#155

Post by dantheman »

A question if you run ads and tune your ad buy to focus on those people with the highest conversion rate. To reduce the amount you're spending by targeting the ads, does this mean that's not allowed?

It looks like this is to ensure advertisement reaches all protected categories. Can this mean that one would be forced to advertise in magazines that cater to different audiences? To guarantee a certain subset of the population is covered?

Thinking of facebook like traditional media doesn't really work. If we allow people to choose where they're advertising, by definition they're targeting. It'd be like randomly buying ads in magazines and papers.

At the end of the day, it seems more like landlords intent for targeting is more important than anything and that is where the fault lies.

If you had a building in an area that catered to people speaking a minority language (5%) of the population; can you target speakers of that language or do you have to spend 20x?

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#156

Post by MBCook »

kryogen1c wrote: post #41

This complaint seems like its shooting itself in the foot - discrimination isn't inherently bad. When you hire, you discriminate based on ability. When you date, you discriminate in a number of ways like beauty, personality, etc. If you're selling ads for wheelchairs you want to discriminate for people with disabilities. If your houses aren't wheelchair accessible, you want your ads to discriminate against people wit…

That’s a straw man.

This case isn’t “no one can discriminate with ads”. It’s “no one can discriminate ILLEGALY with THIS TYPE of ad”.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#157

Post by reaperducer »

AdamM12 wrote: post #64

Why is Facebook in trouble for this and not the persons who actually placed the ads? They aren't the ones renting the real estate. They don't own it. Government overreach imo. Edit: grammatical mistakes

Why is Facebook in trouble for this and not the persons who actually placed the ads?

Wait for it.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#158

Post by quotemstr »

ghaff wrote: post #150
maym86 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was your premise is making up imaginary scenarios that aren't actually happening as a way of creating an issue with the clear problems outlined and this isn't helpful. Creating an imaginary general problem as a way of attacking the specific issue is disingenuous.

More generally, housing discrimination will happen at the individual level in all sorts of subtle and not so subtle ways that can’t be generally stopped. That doesn’t mean you throw your hands up and say that we might as allow any sort of discrimination.

If the intent of policy X is to achieve goal Y and X does not in fact achieve Y, what is the point of continuing to pay the costs of X instead of proposing some X' that actually does achieve Y? Continuing to advocate X when X doesn't achieve Y suggests that the proponents of X don't really care about Y, but instead some unstated Z.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#159

Post by quotemstr »

MBCook wrote: post #148
quotemstr wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your use of the phrase "it's a start" suggests that further restrictions will follow.

No, it implies that they at least appeared to be trying, even if it wasn’t very effective. As it is they don’t seem to have put in the smallest possible effort to comply and decided to ignore the law completely.

Is it more important that they "appear[] to be trying" than that the policy imposed on them actually achieve the ostensible policy goal?

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#160

Post by freeone3000 »

quotemstr wrote: post #83
freeone3000 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't expose me to relevant ads. I live in Montreal. My last three twitter ads were for a drug (reported as illegal) something about a new york lawsuit against an oil company? And for a pizza place which doesn't exist in my country. User targeted ads do not produce better ads, despite everyone selling ads saying so.

Am I supposed to accept your anecdote as evidence? I mean, on the one hand, we have the massive and continued success of platforms that tailor ads to target audiences, and on the other, we have freeone3000's complaint about a pizza ad not being relevant. Ad targeting works. That's a fact. You can argue that we should kill ad targeting anyway, that's fine. You can make that case, and I'd disagree. But to flatly deny t…

Have you seen targeted ads that do work? An advertisement for a product you actually want?
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