Facebook says it will stop some ads from targeting users by ethnicity
Marketers placing housing, employment or credit advertisements on Facebook will no longer be able to use tools that target people by ethnicity, reflecting concern that the company was violating anti-discrimination laws.
“There are many nondiscriminatory uses of our ethnic affinity solution in these areas, but we have decided that we can best guard against discrimination by suspending these types of ads,” Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said in a blog post Friday.
An article by ProPublica published last month reported that advertisers could use Facebook targeting to exclude certain races, or what the company calls “ethnic affinities,” from housing and employment ads, potentially putting the social network in violation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The article prompted scrutiny from civil rights groups and policymakers, including the American Civil Liberties Union and four members of Congress and a class-action lawsuit.
The decision casts a perhaps unwelcome spotlight onto what Facebook calls its “ethnic affinity marketing solution,” which is still available for use outside the areas of housing, employment and credit advertising.
One of Facebook’s main draws for marketers is how narrowly they can target messages. Ads can be sent to people based not only on standard demographics like age, gender and location, but also on other factors, like whether they have an anniversary coming, their interest in horseback riding, whether they use Gmail or Hotmail, and the languages they speak. Users can also be excluded from seeing ads based on this data.
While much of this information is provided voluntarily by users, ethnic affinity is one demographic offered to marketers that users cannot choose, but it is instead assigned based on their interests and activities on Facebook.
On Facebook’s adbuying website, however, advertisers can choose to include or exclude certain demographic “affinities” from ads in the U.S. For instance, they can exclude African-American, AsianAmerican and four “types” of Hispanic, or all of the above.