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HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

hud.gov

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Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#161

Post by MBCook »

UncleEntity wrote: post #51

I'm not really seeing how it's Facebook's job to enforce this particular law as opposed to the HUD whose job it is to go after landlords/sellers doing the actual discriminating. Just because the advertiser can use these tools to discriminate doesn't mean they actually do or mean they aren't 100% personally responsible to comply with the law. I was kind of under the impression there were checks and balances to prevent…

Because the text of the law literally says it is.

This isn’t a question of an agency interpretating a law to mean X, it’s right there in the text.

It was written with newspaper classifieds in mind (and probably other things). But it clearly applies.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#162

Post by reaperducer »

perl4ever wrote: post #54
astura wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very easy thing to avoid though: if (ad target == anything to do with housing) {disable options to exclude ethnic affinity [and a bunch of other things]}

It's not that easy, because there are many proxies that correlate with protected categories. For instance, take a look at the greater DC area with census data on race. You can easily target regions without explicitly using race.

It's not that easy

If a small town newspaper with a staff of 30 can do it, Facebook has both the staff and resources to do the same.

If it cannot, or will not, it should not take advertisements for sectors that are regulated.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#163

Post by nv-vn »

rland wrote: post #135
emilfihlman wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or perhaps that if the law is bad, we should engage in civil disobedience.

Giant multinational corporations are squarely last in the "queue of parties that ought to commit civil disobedience."

Only if you start with the assumption that everything to do with them is evil. At the end of the day, they still employ and support thousands of people. There certainly are many cases in which they do the wrong thing, but their power for good should also be embraced.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#165

Post by reaperducer »

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #33
koboll wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about this complaint would prevent Facebook from addressing it without humans involved? All they're going to do is revoke microtargeting abilities from housing ads.

How do they determine what's a housing ad? There's two pieces to this a) Facebook makes this possible and b) Facebook damns themselves and promotes that they make this possible for housing. Part b is easy to fix: make it harder to do housing ads that are targeted. However, part a is much harder: what stops me from advertising my AirBnb listing as a URL on Facebook as a "generic ad"?

How do they determine what's a housing ad?

The same way that newspapers, television stations, radio stations, magazines, and advertising agencies have for the last 200 or so years.

And they didn't have super-duper AI, the smartest people on the continent, and warehouses full of servers to help.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#166

Post by AnthonyMouse »

yardie wrote: post #26

How did they not see this coming. Are they not familiar with another dotcom called Craigslist who had to deal with this very same regulation years ago. Their counsel either wasn't aware of what FB marketplace was doing or didn't know about FHA laws. > draw a red line around zip codes and then not display ads to Facebook users who live in specific zip codes. This alone is really damn damning. I'm going to go out on a…

> draw a red line around zip codes and then not display ads to Facebook users who live in specific zip codes.

This is actually somewhat odd in this context. Obviously if you're advertising housing in Boston you don't want to be advertising it to people in Washington or China, or probably even Springfield. So you need some way to specify a set of regions and zip code is the obvious way of doing that.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#167

Post by quotemstr »

freeone3000 wrote: post #160
quotemstr wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. Do you have an argument based on evidence, or at least reason, or are we going to continue like this?

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#168

Post by MBCook »

quotemstr wrote: post #112
quadrangle wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other person's reply to you was really this simple: You are asserting a slippery-slope argument, but this is a situation where there are clear places this doesn't lead. It may be fuzzy instead of a clear line, but there's not actually a slippery slope necessarily. And you need to bear burden to show that there is a slippery slope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

The slippy slope here is already in operation. It's the entire rationale behind prohibiting targeting based on zip code: demographics change from zip code to zip code, so the HUD concludes that targeting by zip code is de facto targeting by demographic. What logical basis is there for stopping at zip code targeting and not applying the same logic to other demographic correlates?

> The slippy slope here is already in operation.

Except there are 40 years of court decisions clarifying how the law should be interpreted.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#170

Post by kmonsen »

nv-vn wrote: post #94
beager wrote: post #12

It would seem fairly straightforward for Facebook to collect information about whether an advertisement pertains to something that has anti-discriminatory regulations tied to it (housing, employment). I generally agree that FB should not be allowed to permit users to segment these types of advertisements by the dimensions claimed. However, what piques my curiosity here is whether “indirect” discrimination in choice o…

It's easy until you realize how global Facebook's audience is. What happens if California makes this type of advertising illegal for hotels and Sri Lanka makes it illegal for movie theaters? Now repeat for every possible advertising law.

Facebook (and others) can choose to show ads in any jurisdiction it wants, but if it does it has to follow the rules there. If they want to show ads in day Sri Lanka then they have to read up on and follow the laws there. In some cases it will not be worth it.
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