This Facebook Feature Lets Advertisers Target Specifically by Race

Essentially what the social media platform is currently doing is giving advertisers the opportunity to discriminate freely, categorizing ads to be visible to whichever demographic they choose.

Facebook’s decision to send media back to a time reminiscent of the Jim Crow era is granting white people access to information and advertising that people of color don’t have access to. Needless to say, many are questioning how this is legal, with many making a case that it isn’t.

When ProPublica presented John Relman, a civil rights lawyer, with this information he was shocked at how blatantly the company is breaking the law with its racial exclusion options.

“This is horrifying,” the lawyer said. “This is massively illegal. This is about as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find.”

The law in question was passed in 1968 and made it illegal “to make, print, or publish, or cause to be made, printed, or published any notice, statement, or advertisement, with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin.”

The New York Times, for one major example, was sued back in 1989 for a violation of the Fair Housing Act, agreeing to review ads for their content and make sure that they didn’t include discriminatory content.

Facebook took a preventative measure by noting in its policies that it prohibits advertisers from using the options to target specific audiences for “discrimination, harassment, disparagement or predatory advertising practices.”

The way that the social media site currently works is that it assigns users an “ethic affinity” based on pages and posts that they have liked, or commented on, and that the “ethic affinity” does not equal ones race, which the company doesn’t ask its members to disclose.

Facebook currently is defending its platform and advertising format, saying that since they don’t ask members to disclose their actual race, the posts that exclude people based on their “ethnic affinity” are basically just targeting who Facebook is guessing the advertisers want to target.

Take a look at an example of Facebook’s specific advertising layout in the posts below.

View image on Twitter

 

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1. So Facebook now has a feature in their ad section where you can EXCLUDE ppl based on race. You can exclude every race but “white”

 

If you want to exclude, say, black people from Facebook targeted ads for housing, you can: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers-exclude-users-by-race 

Article Appeared @http://www.bet.com/lifestyle/2016/10/29/this-facebook-feature-lets-advertisers-target-specifically-by-ra.html

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