Facebook Users Sue Over Alleged Racial Discrimination In Housing, Job Ads (arstechnica.com) 177
In response to a report from ProPublica alleging that Facebook gives advertisers the ability to exclude specific groups it calls "Ethnic Affinities," three Facebook users have filed a lawsuit against the company. They are accusing the social networking giant of violating the Federal Housing Act of 1964 over its alleged discriminatory policies. Ars Technica reports: ProPublica managed to post an ad placed in Facebook's housing categories that excluded anyone with an "affinity" for African-American, Asian-American, or Hispanic people. When the ProPublica reporters showed the ad to prominent civil rights lawyer John Relman, he described it as "horrifying" and "as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find." According to the proposed class-action lawsuit, by allowing such ads on its site, Facebook is in violation of the landmark civil rights legislation, which specifically prohibits housing advertisements to discriminate based on race, gender, color, religion, and other factors. "This lawsuit does not seek to end Facebook's Ad Platform, nor even to get rid of the "Exclude People" mechanism. There are legal, desirable uses for such functionalities. Plaintiffs seek to end only the illegal proscribed uses of these functions," the lawyers wrote in the civil complaint, which was filed last Friday. The proposed class, if approved by a federal judge in San Francisco, would include any Facebook user in the United States who has "not seen an employment- or housing-related advertisement on Facebook within the last two years because the ad's buyer used the Ad Platform's 'Exclude People' functionality to exclude the class member based on race, color, religion, sex, familial status, or national origin."
Don't single out Facebook (Score:2)
Uber does it too [arstechnica.com]...
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Facebook supplies the racial affinity of a user to its advertisers, for the purpose of exclusion.
On the other hand, Uber supplies the first name of a passenger to its self-employed drivers, for the purpose of picking them up.
What do you want Uber to do? Assign a randomly generated nickname or password to each passenger. And even then, that wouldn't prevent an Uber driver from visually noticing that a passenger he/she is picking up is black and male.
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Assign a randomly generated nickname or password to each passenger.
Not a bad idea. And it adds a bit of privacy for the user. The driver doesn't need to know the name.
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Not a bad idea. And it adds a bit of privacy for the user.
Only the first name is being transmitted to the driver, and the passenger can already change that first name to whatever they wish.
That's enough privacy I think.
The driver doesn't need to know the name.
Knowing a first name does make pickups in front of crowded night clubs/bars easier.
People who take Ubers are not always sober, nor always fluent in English, but at least they know their own first name.
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Assuming that they have a first name. Not all cultures do.
[Searches for link] Here it is : Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names [kalzumeus.com], from which several relate directly to your incorrect assumptions (note from the numbers how far down the list your assumptions are ; there are much more fundamental mistakes you can make, e.g. that people have names) :
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Untrue. It might be good enough for your limited little life, but that's your deficiency, not my problem.
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No, that's not the objection I was going for.
It doesn't matter if there is an occasional name collision, or if someone left a blank field as their first name.
My point was about convenience during pickups. The system doesn't need to be perfect.
If the system takes an extra minute or two for finding a passenger once in a while, it's not the end of the world.
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Or even a user-provided nickname and/ or password?
Hey, Slashdot let me choose my user name nearly 20 years ago (actually, shouldn't the 20th anniversary be coming up soon? Quick Wiki : "Launched October 5, 1997; "). From the increasing desperation of noob's user names, there is probably some effort to avoid close similarities with existing user names. If Slashdot can do it for nearly 20 years, it's probably not
Re:Don't single out Facebook (Score:5, Interesting)
Strange times we're in that some people are suing to be able to see advertisements, and people want to use the law to force businesses that hate them to take their money.
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It's not about forcing them to take their money. It's about 'forcing' them to provide their services to the public without discriminating. If the population was more balanced where one group doesn't comprise 85% this would not be an issue.
Re:Don't single out Facebook (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not about forcing them to take their money.
Don't kid yourself. Ultimately, this is all about money. From the filed lawsuit:
Defendants’ conduct should be declared unlawful and enjoined, and appropriate penalties and monetary damages should be awarded.
"Racism, I say! I demand compensation for the pain and anguish of not being shown appropriate advertising as the law requires!"
How many zeroes do you think they'll be asking for to assuage their trauma?
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Yes ... because "I could not find a place to live at an affordable price because the ad company hid the offer from me" has NO impact whatsoever on anybody's life and is just an emotional annoyance right ?
These laws exist for a reason - to ensure that people who can afford the rent can rent the house.
Funny how you are applying the usual anti-millenial bullshit attack - against people complaining about violating a law passed by the greatest generation which was, at the time, mostly demanded by the then young
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I mean, this is about the same thing here with Facebook.
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Only if you also install a mechanism that covers the add whenever a minority walks up and tries to read it.
You don't need to go out of your way to be sure minorities can see your advertisement, you just have to be sure you aren't specifically preventing them from seeing your advertisement. A public posting around a neighborhood (and pretty much any public notice of that nature) doesn't prevent anyone from coming up and looking at it, so it's totally fine.
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It's about 'forcing' them to provide their services
You do know that there's a word to describe this, right?
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:-) nice 'creative' editing there...
Now, try finishing the rest of the sentence.
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Seriously? .... Ok, let's do it that way:
It's about 'forcing' them to provide their services to the public without discriminating.
So in other words, slavery is ok so long as the slave doesn't discriminate against his master. Got it.
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:-) Still at it,eh?
They are perfectly welcome to close their doors and not serve anybody
Wanna try again?
Except that's not what you said, you literally said to force them to provide a service. That's your own fault that you don't think before you open your mouth.
However that's beside the point entirely, what I pointed out is how odd it is that somebody wants to pressure another person who hates them into taking their money, rather than simply boycotting them and taking their business elsewhere, which I think is not only a more reasonable choice, but is by far more inline with both people's constitutional righ
Bogus law outlawing Thought-crimes (Score:5, Insightful)
The allegedly-violated itself obviously violates the First Amendment and is thus invalid.
It is both unconstitutional, which should be enough in theory, and ineffective in practice — quite obviously, the interracial relations in this country continue to stink [pbs.org] despite (or because of?) our having a half-Black President.
Whatever it was we tried for over 50 years to achieve racial harmony, is not working. Let's stop sacrificing actual rights to it...
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Bogus law outlawing Thought-crimes
An action was taken that affected others. It's not a 'thought crime'.
The allegedly-violated itself obviously violates the First Amendment and is thus invalid.
Obviously?
It is both unconstitutional, [...]
Through the lens of the first amendment... any limitations on making death threats, committing slander, leaking intelligence to foreign governments, yelling fire in a theater, printing bootleg copies of movies and selling them, and perjury, are all obviously" unconstitutional too. And yet you probably support at least some of those.
So is the first amendment is only the most important thing when it supports the thing you want to
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What made the action illegal is the thought held by the "perpetrators". That makes it a thought-crime.
Perhaps unlike "grabbing pussy", credible death threats are assaults [thefreedictionary.com].
Slander has been a tort (not a crime) since well before the First Amendment was written. It was never in conflict with the Bill of Rights.
People gaining legitimate access to su
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What made the action illegal is the thought held by the "perpetrators". That makes it a thought-crime.
That's a pretty unconventional definition of thought crime. Where did you come up with that? I can't even find any reference that supports that definition, even as a 2ndary use of the term.
Your definition of 'thought crime' includes murder.
credible death threats are assaults.
Of course they are. What's your point? Didn't you make the argument that the first amendment trumps criminal law?
Slander has been a tort (not a crime) since well before the First Amendment was written.
Well duh. The first amendment was written to correct an oversight in the law before it was written. Hence... 'amendment'.
Should not be illegal either.
Its all fun and games until someone is
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So, is anything protected by the Amendment, or is Congress really free to ban any speech it wants to — provided, some justification can be articulated?
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So, is anything protected by the Amendment,
Political speech mostly, and the expression of ideas are the most protected.
Commercial speech (including commercial advertising) is some of the least protected. (Consider that its not just this anti-discrimination in advertising law, but also truth in advertising laws, labelling laws, trademark law, and so forth are all effectively a limitation on people from saying anything they want to sell a product... in that you can't say your snake oil contains unicorn tears, cures cancer, and then stick the J&J
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That's a very vague answer...
The sad reality is, once you accept even a seemingly innocuous infringement — such as, for example, that famous example of yelling "fire" (or "gun!") in a crowd, you start down a very steep and slippery slope. For example, Trump is — according to millions of Americans — a very dangerous man to this country, his election promising to be a disaster far more dangerous than a handful of de
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such as, for example, that famous example of yelling "fire" (or "gun!") in a crowd, you start down a very steep and slippery slope.
Pretty much everything is a continuum. It's not wrong to be concerned about the slippery slope from one side of the continuum to the other, and we should be constantly vigilant. That's basically me agree with what you wrote in bold.
But everything is a slippery slope to something else. And more importantly every ideal conflicts with every other ideal so compromise is inevitable.
A Republic (and a Democracy) can survive such bogus claims being legal. They are a nuisance, but not a threat.
I disagree. A republic and a democracy can't abide them being legal. The people want freedom of speech, but they also want justice a
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Why? It is not illegal to lie in most other circumstances, what's so especially damaging about false advertising? It is certainly annoying — and disgusting — but it poses no special threat...
Back to my question a few posts ago — is the First Amendment (the free speech part) meaningful at all in your opinion? Or is Congress allowed, contrary to what the Amendment states, to make speech-limiting laws as l
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Why? It is not illegal to lie in most other circumstances, what's so especially damaging about false advertising? It is certainly annoying â" and disgusting â" but it poses no special threat...
Turn the question upside down. What is the "special benefit" to society of allowing false advertising? The overwhelming majority want it illegal isn't that pretty much by definition sufficient for it to be made so?
Back to my question a few posts ago â" is the First Amendment (the free speech part) meaningful at all in your opinion? [...] Or is Congress allowed, contrary to what the Amendment states, to make speech-limiting laws as long as some excuse for that can be found?
A 2/3rd majority in congress and the senate plus 38 state legislatures and they can just amend the constitution to allow them to make any adjustment they like.
your waxing argument about inevitability of compromises seems to suggest, a popular law can limit various kinds of speech
That or anything else really. The 18th coming and going nicely illustrates the fluidity possible. The idea that anything is somehow fixed i
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Why should I "turn the question upside down"? Ours is a free country — what is not prohibited is allowed, not the other way around. For you to limit/ban an activity, you and/or other proponents of the ban have to present (good) reasons, not the other way around.
When the activity is speech, no such bans are legal for as long as the First Amendment remains unamended.
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Through the lens of the first amendment... any limitations on making death threats, committing slander, leaking intelligence to foreign governments, yelling fire in a theater, printing bootleg copies of movies and selling them, and perjury, are all obviously" unconstitutional too. And yet you probably support at least some of those.
No "lens" needed. It's written plainly and simply. Any limitations violate the first amendment and are unconstitutional.
I don't support any restrictions on speech, including whatever strawman you want to prop up. The government cannot restrict speech. You can be held responsible and culpable for the direct results of your speech, however. If you can't see the distinction, you're a useful idiot.
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I don't support any restrictions on speech, including whatever strawman you want to prop up.
Ok... this sounds like nutter talk.
You can be held responsible and culpable for the direct results of your speech, however.
Ah... ok; all speech is unrestricted but there can be consequences for what you say... that's reasonable then.
If you can't see the distinction, you're a useful idiot.
But it's a distinction without much difference in this case. What is the so-called 'direct result' of speech? All results of speech can be argued indirect. Unless the speech is literally so loud it damages your ears.
Here the arguably direct result of selectively not showing advertising for housing to black people is "discrimination in advertising housing based on r
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Re:Bogus law outlawing Thought-crimes (Score:4, Insightful)
That's absurd. Of course, you can target your ads to certain groups. People have done that for a century. Minority groups are some of the biggest beneficiaries of this ability.
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Indeed, it's not the targeting per-se that is the issue, it's that it has been used to deliberately exclude non-whites. It's a lot like the case against Trump's real estate interests that tried to exclude minorities because they thought it would increase the value of the property and keep rents high.
It's often quite hard to prove, but in this case it's likely that they will be able to find some incriminating emails or identify a pattern of behaviour that gives the game away.
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You obviously haven't read TFA and you are just confabulating. They weren't advertising anything or excluding anybody. This is an activist group that is complaining about the existence of ethnic ad targeting.
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Targeting is fine, and totally legal. Military discounts, elderly discounts, child discounts, etc. That's all fine.
What's not fine are things like male discounts, white discounts, straight discounts, hispanic discounts, black discounts, see the difference?
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AC said "What you can't do, is engage in commerce with a broadcaster to only communicate in certain ways to certain people." I pointed out that you can, and I stand by that.
You're shifting the goalposts now, talking about "discounts" and making up all sorts of unrelated crap. You're also equivocating with ambiguous terms like "what's not fine". You're a veritable treasure trove of logical fallacies and poor debating habits.
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It is much more than that. The 1964 law cited by TFA is used to tell Facebook, what they can and can not say — and to whom. It obviously abridges Facebook's freedom of speech. If we were to accept the general idea, that government may dictate, who speech can addressed to, we would allow the government to suppress speech altogether: there-there, you can still talk to yourself in the shower — that takes care of your First Am
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They haven't just failed, they have been counterproductive. The effect of these various laws has largely been to keep homophobes, racists, and sexists in business and to turn overt discrimination into hidden discrimination.
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For employment, I am willing to compromise and limit anti-discrimination laws to manual labor and similar jobs for which they are originally designed for. Things like formal performance reviews was designed for jobs that was easily measurable.
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They were designed decades ago when hiring large amount of workers to do manual labor jobs was common and the only alternative to these jobs was unemployment for many black people. This is why performance reviews and statistics are often used in the lawsuits.
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Canary in the coal mine (Score:2, Offtopic)
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Because this election is really about the Supreme Court.
Exactly what the democrats are saying to scare people into voting for Hillary. Funny how both sides use the same argument.
Re:Canary in the coal mine (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's see
Let's say you're running a business that's selling hijabs to a primarily local ethnic minority in your town. You'd want to use FB's (or any ad syndicator's) tools to focus your advertising on an audience that's most likely to actually be interested your products. So, that would make you a racist fuckstick, according to you, right? No? I see.
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You knew this was coming (Score:1)
Advertising looking for "favorable" traits can also be used to discriminate. Interestingly I have not seen any proof that discrimination occurred, but that the tagging system would allow such (obviously).
The SJWs deserve much pain as they eat themselves.
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You aren't paying attention. ProPublica is complaining about ad targeting. Translated into the real world, that means that if you place an ad in the East Hampton Star, you also need to place it on Black Entertainment Network. That's obviously ridiculous. Advertisers frequently target spe
users (Score:3)
A bunch of lawyers found three Facebook users who'd agree to have their names thrown onto a lawsuit so they could cash in on some of that big class-action legal fee action.
As usual, the winners will be the lawyers.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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Speaking of Canada, you might find this interesting. At my kid's high school, they are collecting used winter jackets specifically for Native families. Doesn't that sound discriminating against every non-Native in Canada? If they were collecting winter jackets for white families only you just know there would be a stink. Really, it should be a collection for poor families, as poverty is colour blind.
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Fighting racism is a kind of magical machine that produces political power and moral righteousness as outputs. The people that benefit from it I think actually fear the end of racism because it will reduce their political power.
I think what's left at this stage isn't racial animosity but cultural animosity. It's not about skin color, it's about an amalgamation of cultural values that people object to. This would seem to explain things like anti-Islamic attitudes, where race is often quite ambiguous, or
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The sensationalism surrounding these cases are indeed something to worry. It's almost like somebody is out there making sure the racial divide is preserved. But on the other hand, racism is a very real thing that you have to deal with if you are a non-white. Probably you do not think it is an issue because it has not happened to to you. Sure you can just let it go and look the other way, but when it comes to important stuff like housing, it is important to have these laws in place.
I think the greatest Obama
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ProPublica advertised an event, not housing. (Score:2, Insightful)
https://www.propublica.org/documents/item/3191165-Facebook-Propublica-Ad.html
The event was about fighting back if rent is illegally high. They targeted the event at a certain demographic.
I don't know how this becomes "Facebook practices housing discrimination". I don't use or care for Facebook, but this might just be a problem with their advertising system.
I'm not even sure if Propublica would be on the hook if they did make actual housing ads. Facebook is just the platform while Propublica is the one do
Its Not Discriminatory (Score:1)
This is not discrimination... that's like saying that subway is discriminating against aliens because they don't advertise on the moon... the whole concept of targeted ads is not discriminator.. its targeted! If by some chance a black person sees one of these housing ads its not like they will be stopped from buying a house.
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the whole concept of targeted ads is not discriminator.
The whole concept of targeted ads is discriminatory. Targeting is practically a synonym for discriminating. Most discrimination or targetting isn't illegal though, but discriminating on race generally is.
So targeting people who like hockey by advertising during a hockey game instead of an NBA is legal. As is telling facebook to show the ad only to people who 'liked' hockey.
But telling facebook to only show an ad to white people ? That's probably going to end up being found not legal.
If by some chance a black person sees one of these housing ads its not like they will be stopped from buying a house.
Where is this part of yo
Facebook is doing them a favour (Score:3, Interesting)
The proposed class, if approved by a federal judge in San Francisco, would include any Facebook user in the United States who has "not seen an employment- or housing-related advertisement on Facebook within the last two years because...
This has to be the first time in history someone has been wronged by not being shown an ad
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It's happened before, e.g. when real estate agents neglect to show some people certain properties because they want to keep them racially segregated.
Another sham class action (Score:3)
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Exactly this. It seems more like a violation by the advertisers to make use of available options that are illegal in their specific cases when they should know damn well it is illegal for them to do so. Facebook providing the options in and of itself isn't what is at fault here as there are definitely certain products and services that appeal more to certain demographic.
Also given that there will be very easily associated keywords it should be very easy to provide the courts with advertisers for housing and
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It's about as funny as the Nvidia tying G-Force experience to a mandatory user account, and then in the thread of complaints seeing people saying they are getting legal advice about this. Like wtf America.
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Because Facebook is the one that actually did the restricting of who could and couldn't see the ads, and so are complicit.
Think of it like going to an ad agency and saying "Hey, I want to put this ad up for this place I'm renting, but I don't want brown people to see it."
The ad agency would tell you to go pound sand, because they'd be complicit in violating the law if they ran an ad campaign like that.
Facebook is the ad agency here, and they failed to tell the racist to go pound sand.
It's very similar to th
note: no actual discrimination (Score:5, Insightful)
Note that ProPublica posted the racist ad themselves, and there was no actual discrimination.
Furthermore, this is about ad targeting by demographics, not housing discrimination; you know, like you don't want to target Hip Hop events to Norwegian bachelor farmers, or gay pride events to Black protestant church goers. And if ad targeting is discriminatory for a specific product, then it's the advertiser, not the publisher, that's at fault.
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Exactly... This is about as racist as Redfin or Zillow choosing to advertise during Big Bang Theory on CBS, but not some other show on BET.
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I don't know what you mean by actual discrimination. Here is what the law says:
"Section 804(c) of the Fair Housing Act, 42 U.S.C. 3604(c), as amended, makes it unlawful 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 because of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national
Re:note: no actual discrimination (Score:4, Interesting)
This isn't about illegal content, it's about ad targeting. Ad targeting isn't prohibited by law: read what you quoted.
It's not that simple. Newspapers are potentially liable when they have real estate sections and when they knowingly accept discriminatory ads. Since Facebook advertising is automatic and there is no separate real estate section, their situation is different. Facebook's liability is likely the same as for any other content: they need to remove it once they know about it. But, again, that doesn't even apply in this situation, since ProPublica isn't complaining about content, but about targeting.
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That's not how similar tech cases have gone down.
Willful ignorance is not a defense. Facebook COULD know if those ads were discriminatory or not, but choose not to. In similar situations, the courts find that they are just as liable as if they DID know.
That's why YouTube responds to DMCA take-downs the way it does - because it is feasible that they react immediately, they are required to react immediately. Because it is possible for them to detect potentially infringing material and remove it, they are requ
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Well, those ads weren't discriminatory, they were targeted. Ad targeting is not illegal under the letter of non-discrimination laws AFAIK, but you are welcome to develop a novel legal theory.
Furthermore, most forms of discrimination by private entities simply aren't illegal anyway.
Re:note: no actual discrimination (Score:4, Interesting)
The law was written well before anyone could place housing ads on the internet. The closest non-internet equivalent would be if you posted your ad on telephone poles except in predominantly non-white neighborhoods. But even that isn't illegal. So if that isn't, why is not showing an ad to certain people online illegal?
You might be able to argue that it should be illegal, but, as written, it's not.
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And if ad targeting is discriminatory for a specific product, then it's the advertiser, not the publisher, that's at fault.
By forcing the publisher to defend itself, the lawsuit is probably hoping that Facebook will be forced to disclose which advertisers are doing the same thing. After which, the lawsuit against Facebook can stop and the advertisers in question can be sued instead.
But it's not in Facebook's financial interest to throw their own customers (their real customers, their advertisers) under the bus.
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It is perfectly legitimate for most advertisers to discriminate by race. Furthermore, the advertisers who most commonly discriminate based on race, sexual orientation, or gender are those who actually benefit minorities and women. So, you want to hur
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And if ad targeting is discriminatory for a specific product, then it's the advertiser, not the publisher, that's at fault.
I'm not sure this distinction would hold legally, given that the "publisher" (Facebook, in this instance) is specifically including a mechanism to do discriminatory ad targeting (if indeed the ad targeting is ruled discriminatory).
It's kinda like arguing that a hit man isn't "at fault" for targeting a person for assassination. After all, the employer hired the hit man. Moreover, the hit man gave him a run down of his services, even specifically offering to assassinate A or B or C to help the employer ac
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There are many legitimate uses for ad targeting, so providing the mechanism isn't per se discriminatory. Furthermore, discrimination is legal in many contexts; for example, Hillary Clinton has targeted many of her ads to different racial groups.
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The discrimination for Ebony Magazine is behavioral, just like Facebooks. That is, nobody is keeping you from behaving in a way so that these ads are targeted at you.
Except Facebook's model is not transparent. You don't know what data they have on you. You don't know what groups you're in. You don't know how you're being targeted (or what ads you might never see).
Hence, you cannot know how you might change your behavior to see ads you don't even know exist, because you don't know what behaviors have caused Facebook's classifications.
Well, I don't use Facebook and I don't know how they target. On Google, however, you can see what information Google has inferred about you, and you can also turn off ad targeting.
That's nice. Hooray for Google. This is a discussion about Facebook, however, and its potential liability for the way it designs its
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So what? I simply pointed out that this wasn't "housing discrimination" in the FHA or public accommodations sense. This is about ad targeting, something that historically has not been illegal.
You're welcome to share your vast legal expertise with ProPublica and set them right on what they are actually complain
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How did FACEBOOK discriminate? (Score:3)
Suppose for the moment the story is true: people buying ad space from Facebook can ask the automated algorithm to only show their ads to certain demographics. Those who posted the ads may very well have violated the law, but how does it make Facebook responsible? They aren't checking each and every ad for legal compliance, after all, and the ads don't represent Facebook itself.
This is a moral point (Facebook shouldn't be held responsible for discriminatory content posted by users) but it may have legal teeth, depending on the previous contours of the liability shield of 47 USC 230 [wikipedia.org].
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The issue is that Facebook provides tools which can be abused in this way, and does nothing to police their use. I'm surprised Facebook hasn't simply disabled this kind of targeting for certain categories, like real estate and dating.
It may or may not be illegal, but I imagine the goal is probably to draw attention and convince Facebook to alter its policy.
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This is a moral point (Facebook shouldn't be held responsible for discriminatory content posted by users)
Except it's not the ad content that is potentially discriminatory. It's not like we're talking about people running ads saying, "Apartment/job available. Whites applications only, please." That would be discriminatory content in the ad itself.
Instead, we're talking about a system deliberately designed to deliver ads to individuals (and not show them to other individuals) potentially based on their race. That system is created by Facebook. Facebook is potentially liable for misuse of such a system.
T
FB doesn't discriminate, people do (Score:2)
It's a tool people. It allows bacon manufacturers to not piss off Muslims or Jewish people by spamming them with coupons for their products. It allows businesses to target their advertising dollars. If illegal discrimination is occurring, go after the parties discriminating, not everyone in-between. Is ProPublica going after Apple next if they manage to post a discriminating ad from an iPad?
This sounds like an overblown oversight. (Score:2)
Suing Facebook over this just seems silly. For one, can anyone show that this actually happened outside the ProPublica report? Did anyone bring
Damn straight! (Score:2)
That's what you get for trying to take the easy way out! Now he'll have to tell all those (insert relevant racist slurs here) that "he'll call them" or that "it's already taken", just like everyone else!
On a less cynical note, you can't fight racism that way. I'd rather want to know beforehand that some landlord is a racist bastard, it saves me time, he won't let to me anyway and I sure as fuck don't want to rent from him!
Re:Slashdot double standard (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it okay to hate Indians but not others?
It is not okay to hate Indians, or to hate anyone, for that matter. It is not okay to bash without reason, to discriminate, or to fail to treat someone with respect.
I distinguish this from the idea of protecting American jobs and wages, from preventing employers bringing in foreign nationals solely for the purpose of displacing higher paid American workers and depressing wages for those who remain. And those employers often don't treat the hired foreign nationals equally or with respect, either.
Are you perhaps fighting the wrong battle here?
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Ridiculous. You hate people who hate Indians. Ergo, there are definitely situations where it is acceptable to hate.
You are advocating for total nihilism.
And the situation here is the same as it has always been. The vast majority of robberies of cab drivers are black men. The vast majority of cab drivers, including black men who are cab drivers, do not pick up black men because it is in their mind not worth the risk.
The reason this particular issue never gets more traction is relatively few cab drivers a
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Ridiculous. You hate people who hate Indians. Ergo, there are definitely situations where it is acceptable to hate.
I have no idea how you got that from "It's not ok to hate anybody". You know just because you don't hate one person doesn't mean you have to hate another person, right?
You are advocating for total nihilism.
Do you even know what that is? I don't think you do, because the OP said absolutely nothing that even relates to nihilism.
And the situation here is the same as it has always been. The vast majority of robberies of cab drivers are black men. The vast majority of cab drivers, including black men who are cab drivers, do not pick up black men because it is in their mind not worth the risk.
So? I have no idea if that is true, I have serious doubts considering I have black friends who don't complain about not being able to get cabs, and I know I personally have never been asked what race I was when I called a
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Because if we don't protect American Jobs, American workers who have lost their job will break into your apartment and steal your stuff.
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Re:Slashdot double standard (Score:4, Informative)
It seems to me you have misunderstood the bashing going on, or at least understood it differently from how I understand it.
As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of bashing: The first is aimed at the companies laying off their workers and then hiring cheaper workers. Whether they're high-school drop outs, college grads, H1B workers, doesn't matter. It is the idea of getting rid of the workforce you HAVE so you can get someone CHEAPER that is bashed.
The second is bashing at the general skill level of the H1B workers, or Indian outsources in general. This is backed up by evidence of companies that started on the outsourcing fad and had to pull things back to America to get the quality back up to what they wanted. Again it is not bashing the Indians, but the skill level of the specific subset of people getting into that line of work.
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Regardless of what you think or feel, it isn't "general consensus" till you demonstrate that it is.
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No, it's valuable experience
Actually, it isn't. Software developers are not interchangeable cogs in a machine. Each project has unique considerations, unique requirements, unique properties all of which makes it pretty much impossible to apply broad generalizations. What stage is the project in? How tightly defined are the requirements? How experienced are the people managing it? Have they ever managed a remote team before? How flexible is the design? Does it even make sense to use this technology? etc etc etc. Its typically "MBA styl
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The plural of anecdote is not data.
No, it's valuable experience. A lot of us have been through it, some repeatedly. My company decided to contract to India to build a new CRM-style application for our call center. 18 months later, it still didn't work; not that it just needed polishing, I mean you couldn't even start the fucking JBoss instance because there were too many errors. We never did see the thing run, just mockups. The CTO eventually told them to fuck off, we hired 4 more developers inhouse, and got the entire project completed in 6 months alongside our other duties.
Had we just hired *one* local developer at the conception of the project, and kept everything internal, we would have saved a year, several hundred thousand dollars in human fees, and whatever else was lost in productivity while we sat on our ass waiting for deliverables to be needfully done. The CxOs learned the hard way, and nowadays the word "India" is a curse in our office.
Well I have been on both sides of many such things. In many cases, the projects fail for very very predictable reasons: 1. Management always selects the lowest cost bidder. There is some kind of feeling that automagically the risk is transferred to the vendor who has been foolish enough to bid at the lowest cost. 2. Vendors are so keen to please the client that they forget the basics of how to avoid SNAFUs. The only question vendor's management permits their people on the ground is 'how high' when they a
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oh, complaining about corporations H1B use is "racist"?
complaining about the huge amount of scammers in India that buy blocks of cellphone numbers to appear as U.S. company or the IRS is "racist"?
Complaining about Indian workers receiving outsourced jobs who then sell proprietary information and customer information is "racist"?
How about the simpler explanation, that you have a chip on your shoulder
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Ask anyone who ever had to suffer from some big company's tech support whether they are ok with discriminating against Indians. I dare you.
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ProPublica's ad didn't violate the Fair Housing Act; they advertised for a public speaking event, not for housing.
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Tilting at windmills means that you're attacking something as though it's an enemy when it's something entirely mundane. It's a reference to Don Quixote, in which the delusional protagonist attacks a windmill on horseback thinking it's a giant. Tilting is a jousting term, and Holland has quite a lot of windmills.