Facebook Reportedly Still Running Discriminatory Ads

The Markup’s reporter, Jeremy B. Merrill found out that discriminatory advertisements are still running on Facebook. Last year, the company even agreed to end some targeting options for housing, job, and credit ads.

WHAT IS THE REPORT STATING?

In its report, The Markup distinguished a few activity posting advertisements that utilized Facebook’s platform to discriminate against clients of explicit ages or “multicultural affinity”:
In May, a Wisconsin social insurance organization, Tenderness Health Care, posted a job promotion on Facebook searching for personal care laborers. As per Facebook’s “Why am I seeing this ad” pop up, when the agency bought the advertisement, it asked Facebook to not show it to anybody more than 54 years old. Also, they asked Facebook to show it explicitly to individuals who have “African American multicultural affinity.” Facebook, evidently, agreed.

ADS RUNNING AGAINST FACEBOOK’S OWN POLICIES

These ad practices conflict and go against Facebook’s own policies as well as could disregard federal law. In March 2019, as a component of a lawful settlement with social rights group, Facebook consented to prohibit advertisers and promoters from utilizing some target options for possibly biased ads. At that point, Facebook said that any advertiser purchasing housing, work, or credit advertisements would no be prohibited from targetting on users dependent on age, sex, or postal code.

A couple of days after that declaration from Facebook, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development recorded charges against the company for lodging discrimination. In its 2019 complaint, HUD asserted that Facebook’s promoting policies “gave a toggle button that empowers sponsors and advertisers to avoid men or women from seeing an ad, a search box to reject individuals who don’t communicate in a particular language from seeing an ad, and a map tool to prohibit individuals who live in a specified zone from seeing an ad by drawing a red line around that zone.”