Facebook to weed out the bad guys in advertising
san francisco — Maybe it’s not so bad to have algorithmic overlords — at least when they are pressured into protecting people rather than exploiting them.
Earlier this week, Facebook declared that it will no longer let certain kinds of advertisers engage in racial profiling. Specifically, it will prohibit credit, housing and employment advertisers from using “ethnic affinity” categories — marketing profiles that correlate strongly with race — in deciding whom to exclude from their audience.
The reform didn’t happen out of the blue. Pressure came first from a ProPublica investigative experiment last October, in which the news organisation successfully submitted to Facebook a housing advertisement that excluded minority affinity categories. This led to a lawsuit claiming that Facebook was violating federal fair housing and civil rights laws.
Educational advertisers, such as for-profit colleges that have been known to target poor African Americans, have been left out of the new policy. That’s possibly because there’s no federal law against this kind of profiling. Which is to say, Facebook is starting to act like a private regulator, going after and policing unlawful activities.
A similar story can be told about Google, which in 2016 announced that it would get rid of payday lending advertisers, and has since reported removing 1.7 billion so-called “bad ads,” including five million for payday loans. So, Google has taken on the role of policing as well.
This might be a desirable development, especially amid growing concern that President Donald Trump’s administration may rein in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal agency charged with protecting the American public from financial predators.
But it also raises some difficult questions. First, both Google and Facebook rely on algorithms to vet advertisers. So, will they prevent bad actors from gaming their vetting systems? That said, let’s welcome Facebook’s new policies. If Trump chooses to pull back on consumer protection, this might be as good as it gets. — Bloomberg