Facebook Says It Has Stopped Discriminatory “Ethnic Affinity” Ads

Facebook advertising, which generated about $18 billion last year, uses targeting algorithms that hone in with uncanny precision on users’ identities and interests. Facebook has developed tools that can “target audiences as narrow as 18-to-24-year-old men in Connecticut who are in long-distance relationships,” writes the New York Times, but those same tools may allow it to discriminate in ways that have been illegal since the 1960s. This happens specifically through the use of a marketing category called “ethnic affinity,” which the company identifies not by getting an affirmative check in a box, but rather on the basis of the user’s carefully registered on-line history. A few weeks ago Facebook was taken to task in a ProPublica article for the way it used this category for what the investigators characterized as a kind of Jim Crow-era advertising, specifically for housing ads. That article prompted a spate of criticism from civil rights groups and members of Congress, and a class action lawsuit. Although it maintains there are legitimate non-discriminatory ways to use this feature, Facebook has backed off. It says it will no longer let marketers place housing, employment, or credit ads that target people by ethnicity.