ProPublica, a New York-based investigative newsroom revealed Facebook’s advertising tool violates civil rights housing laws by allowing advertisers to cater to certain segments. To demonstrate Facebook’s tool violates Fair Housing Laws, ProPublica, a non-profit news team dedicated to consumer interests, created an ad on 10/20/2016. The Facebook tool allows the advertiser to set targeting rules that can exclude viewers by race. Can you believe it?
This gives the advertisers supreme rights to target by various criteria including behaviors, interests, and exclusion permission over what is called “Ethnic Affinities.” Ethnics Affinities simply means the ability to hide segments from the ad based on gender, race, or other criteria. This exclusion practice can violate certain federal laws and in this case, housing and employment laws.
Of course, Facebook executives reported their advertising tool does not break any laws. In a statement, Facebook executives stated, “we are committed to providing people with quality ad experiences, which includes helping people see messages that are both relevant to the cultural communities they are interested in and have content that reflects or represents their communities — not just generic content that’s targeted to mass audiences” (Hinchliffe, 2016).
ProPublica’s investigative report found that ads using these tools could still be illegal and the famous civil rights attorney, John Relman, stated the tool is an outright violation of the Fair Housing Laws. After receiving much attention, the Facebook Executives made minimal changes to their advertising tool to comply with federal laws.
I published this article not to debate the discrimination issue but to raise the importance of right targeting in advertising. The ad creative is a critical component of the overall campaign. Equally important is the underlying data and targeting list including the criteria to support the campaign. The creative advertisement and the consumer list must comply with legal regulations and ethical principles.
Facebook is researching the ad and their approval process. See the ProPublica ad below inviting consumers to a renters’ forum. The next image shows the Facebook tool and the criteria used to exclude African Americans, Asians, and Hispanics. Essentially, if consumers in these ethnic groups visited this area of Facebook page, they would not see ad based on the exclusion rule and therefore, would not be exposed to the ad invitation for the renters’ forum. Hmmm …
Reference
ProPublica.org About Us (n.d.) Retrieved from https://www.propublica.org/about/
Hinchliffe, E. (2016). Facebook reportedly allows advertisers to exclude users by ‘ethnic affinity’ (n.d.). Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2016/10/28/facebook-ethnic-affinity-advertising/#0QlyLbIFR5qK
Kulp, P. (2016). When Online Ad Targeting Become Blatant Discrimination (n.d.). Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2016/11/12/facebook-google-ad-discrimination/?utm_cid=mash-prod-nav-sub-st#T9FYWq.lKkq9