Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race

Imagine if, during the Jim Crow era, a newspaper offered advertisers the option of placing ads only in copies that went to white readers.

That’s basically what Facebook is doing nowadays.


The ubiquitous social network not only allows advertisers to target users by their interests or background, it also gives advertisers the ability to exclude specific groups it calls “Ethnic Affinities.” Ads that exclude people based on race, gender and other sensitive factors are prohibited by federal law in housing and employment.

Here is a screenshot of an ad we purchased in Facebook’s housing categories via the company’s advertising portal:



The ad we purchased was targeted to Facebook members who were house hunting and excluded anyone with an “affinity” for African-American, Asian-American or Hispanic people. (Here’s the ad itself.)

When we showed Facebook’s racial exclusion options to a prominent civil rights lawyer John Relman, he gasped and said, “This is horrifying. This is massively illegal. This is about as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find.”

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 makes 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.” Violators can face tens of thousands of dollars in fines.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 also prohibits the “printing or publication of notices or advertisements indicating prohibited preference, limitation, specification or discrimination” in employment recruitment.

Facebook’s business model is based on allowing advertisers to target specific groups — or, apparently to exclude specific groups — using huge reams of personal data the company has collected about its users. Facebook’s microtargeting is particularly helpful for advertisers looking to reach niche audiences, such as swing-state voters concerned about climate change. ProPublica recently offered a tool allowing users to see how Facebook is categorizing them. We found nearly 50,000 unique categories in which Facebook places its users.

Facebook says its policies prohibit advertisers from using the targeting options for discrimination, harassment, disparagement or predatory advertising practices.

“We take a strong stand against advertisers misusing our platform: Our policies prohibit using our targeting options to discriminate, and they require compliance with the law,” said Steve Satterfield, privacy and public policy manager at Facebook. “We take prompt enforcement action when we determine that ads violate our policies."

Satterfield said it’s important for advertisers to have the ability to both include and exclude groups as they test how their marketing performs. For instance, he said, an advertiser “might run one campaign in English that excludes the Hispanic affinity group to see how well the campaign performs against running that ad campaign in Spanish. This is a common practice in the industry.”

He said Facebook began offering the “Ethnic Affinity” categories within the past two years as part of a “multicultural advertising” effort.

Satterfield added that the “Ethnic Affinity” is not the same as race — which Facebook does not ask its members about. Facebook assigns members an “Ethnic Affinity” based on pages and posts they have liked or engaged with on Facebook.

When we asked why “Ethnic Affinity” was included in the “Demographics” category of its ad-targeting tool if it’s not a representation of demographics, Facebook responded that it plans to move “Ethnic Affinity” to another section.

Facebook declined to answer questions about why our housing-categories ad excluding minority groups was approved 15 minutes after we placed the order.

By comparison, consider the advertising controls that the New York Times has put in place to prevent discriminatory housing ads. After the newspaper was successfully sued under the Fair Housing Act in 1989, it agreed to review ads for potentially discriminatory content before accepting them for publication.

Steph Jespersen, the Times’ director of advertising acceptability, said that the company’s staff runs automated programs to make sure that ads that contain discriminatory phrases such as “whites only” and “no kids” are rejected.

The Times’ automated program also highlights ads that contain potentially discriminatory code words such as “near churches” or “close to a country club.” Humans then review those ads before they can be approved.

Jespersen said the Times also rejects housing ads that contain photographs of too many white people. The people in the ads must represent the diversity of the population of New York, and if they don’t, he says he will call up the advertiser and ask them to submit an ad with a more diverse lineup of models.

But, Jespersen said, these days most advertisers know not to submit discriminatory ads: “I haven’t seen an ad with ‘whites only’ for a long time.”

Clarification, Oct. 28, 2016: We’ve updated the story to explain more clearly that the ad we bought was not for housing itself — it was placed in Facebook’s housing categories.

Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race

 

My first thought is, "why don't Black folks create our own?" but then I realized that Black folks would most likely not support it.#WhiteIceIsColder

 

Facebook Is Defending Its “Ethnic Affinity” Targeting in Housing Ads

This feature isn’t new: It generated some debate earlier this year when Universal Studios revealed that it had developed different Straight Outta Compton trailers for black and white audiences during a South by Southwest marketing panel. Facebook has defended the tool as “an opportunity to serve highly relevant ad content to affinity-based audiences.”

As ProPublica points out, however, the feature may run afoul of federal law when it’s applied to ads for housing. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibits, among other things, any housing advertisement that indicates race-based preference or discrimination. Thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it’s also illegal to discriminate in ads related to employment.

When ProPublica showed Facebook’s demographic exclusion options to civil rights lawyer John Relman, he reportedly gasped and called them “horrifying,” “massively illegal,” and “about as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find.”

defense of this tool—as articulated in a public post by its head of U.S. multicultural sales, Christian Martinez—is twofold.

First, Martinez says the company’s policies prohibit discriminatory advertisements, and that if it learns of any such ads it will take “aggressive enforcement action” against them. That might seem a little disingenuous, given that the company’s own tools seem to facilitate, if not encourage, such discrimination. But Martinez says there are legitimate uses for what’s known in the ad industry as “exclusion targeting.” For instance, he says, it could be used to prevent members of a certain affinity group from seeing the general-interest version of an ad for which a more culturally specific version exists. Another Facebook spokesman suggested to ProPublica that it could be used for A/B testing.

Secondly, Facebook insists that excluding people based on ethnic affinity does not equate to discriminating based on race. Facebook does not ask users their race, so it doesn't know for sure what ethnic group they belong to. It doesn’t really even know individuals’ ethnic affinities: Instead, it infers that based on behavioral signals, such as pages they've liked that are associated with certain demographic groups. That means Facebook's "African-American" ethnic affinity group could include people of other races.

Neither of these defenses seems likely to hold up to close scrutiny.


Any benefits advertisers or consumers might derive from ads that exclude certain “ethnic affinity” groups would seem to be outweighed by the potential societal harm of these ads, at least in realms such as housing and employment. Facebook’s suggestion that it somehow polices its ads to make sure they’re not being “misused” is undermined by the fact that ProPublica’s reporters were able to purchase a housing ad that excluded minority affinity groups—and Facebook approved it within 15 minutes.

Even if ethnic affinity is not identical to race, it’s obviously a proxy for it. Martinez partly dismissed the problem by saying targeted ads are only relevant to people who “choose to affiliate” with ethnic communities. But as Fusionpoints out, you can see the ethnic affinity Facebook has assigned you by visiting your Ad Preferences page, but you can’t change it. All you can do is opt out of such targeting altogether.

I doubt Facebook is actually trying to facilitate discriminatory ads, for housing or anything else. Rather, this seems like just the sort of tool that would be built by naïve, well-meaning Silicon Valley engineers who lack a deep appreciation for either the law or American history. As Shane Ferro put it:

Today in "when engineers haven't taken enough liberal arts classes" Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race pic.twitter.com/SwGLMckEK5

— RIP My Menchies ☠️ (@shaneferro) October 28, 2016
One software engineer’s response only reinforced her point:

Follow
Bruno Skvorc @bitfalls
See I think that act is outdated and retarded. If I know who my target audience is, and who is more likely to buy, I want to target them. https://twitter.com/shaneferro/status/791985164222140417 …

12:18 PM - 28 Oct 2016

To be fair, Skvorc does not work at Facebook. But while the defenses from the company’s own spokespeople are more politically correct, they aren’t much more convincing. The correct answer from Facebook to ProPublica’s article would probably be something more like: “You’re right, that’s bad. We didn’t mean to build a tool that could be used that way. We’ll fix it ASAP.” Let’s hope we get that version soon.

Meanwhile, here’s one more good question for those at Facebook who see no problem with this tool:

Follow
Kevin Lyda @lyda
@JuliaAngwin @ProPublica @stuntbox @hannahsbirch As an aside, any idea why I can't exclude white people from ads?

3:40 PM - 28 Oct 2016

Facebook Lets Housing Ads Target People by “Ethnic Affinity.” Yep, That’s Racist.