Facebook settles civil rights cases with sweeping changes to its online advertising platform

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The ACLU, along with our client Communications Workers of America and other civil rights groups, announced a historic settlement agreement with Facebook which will bring about major changes to Facebook’s advertising platform. Advertisers will no longer be able to prevent users from inquiring about housing, employment or credit opportunities based on gender, age or other protected characteristics.

This policy shift follows years of work by civil rights advocates, including a court challenge from the ACLU, the Communications Workers of America, and the civil rights law firm Outten & Golden LLP. In September, we collectively filed charges with the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission on behalf of CWA and individual job seekers against Facebook and a number of companies that were targeting certain job advertisements. for young male Facebook users. The charges joined other litigation alleging racial discrimination in job vacancies, housing and credit and age discrimination in job vacancies.

Most Facebook users probably didn’t even know this type of exclusionary ad targeting was happening. Some 30 years after the digitization of our daily lives began, we are still faced with the fact that the vast mine of data we transmit with every “like”, search, post or click – often without our knowledge or consent – will be used to target advertisements to us.

This type of data mining is ubiquitous on Facebook, which attracts advertisers by touting the power of its targeting tool to only show users ads that Facebook or advertisers think they are interested in, depending on how the data is. individualized describe them. But there is a discriminatory flip side to this practice. Ad targeting platforms can be used to exclude users based on race, gender, or age, as well as interests or groups that may act as a proxy for those categories (think “soccer moms” or “Kwanzaa celebrators”).

As more and more people turn to the internet for jobs, apartments and loans, there is a real risk that ad targeting reproduce and even exacerbate existing racial and gender prejudices in society. Imagine if an employer chooses to display ads for engineering jobs only to men – not only will users who are not identified as men never see those ads, but they’ll never know what they have either. lack. After all, we rarely have a way to identify the ads we serve. not view online. The fact that this discrimination is invisible to the excluded user makes it all the more difficult to stop.

Whether you call it uploading, algorithmic discrimination, Where automated inequality, it is now clear that the rise of big data and the highly personalized marketing it enables have led to these new forms of discrimination. This targeting undermined long-standing civil rights laws, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and similar civil rights laws, which prohibit discrimination on the basis of protected rights. characteristics – such as race, gender, and age – in advertising for housing, employment, and credit opportunities. It was only after the adoption of Title VII in 1964 that job advertisements ceased to specify whether employers were looking for male or female candidates. It is imperative that online platforms act to prevent these archaic forms of discrimination from taking on new life in the 21st century.

In the first such settlement announced today, Facebook agreed to create a separate space on its platform for advertisers to create ads for jobs, housing and credit. In the separate space, Facebook will eliminate targeting based on age and gender as well as targeting options associated with protected characteristics or groups. Targeting based on postal code or a geographic area less than a 15 mile radius will not be allowed. And Facebook will stop considering the age, gender, zip code, or membership of users in Facebook “groups” when creating “like” audiences for advertisers.

Facebook will also require employment, housing and credit advertisers to certify compliance with anti-discrimination laws, and it will institute an automated and humane review system to ensure these ads are properly identified and routed. in a separate stream. Additionally, due to a three-year monitoring period in the deal, we will be closely monitoring Facebook’s progress to ensure it fully implements these changes.

ACLU and partner civil rights groups has been defend for changes like these for almost three years, and Facebook had already agreed to remove some targeting options that could serve as a proxy for the race after investigation journalism exposed the practice. According to today’s regulation, Facebook will also remove targeting options based on gender, age and other protected characteristics while committing to ensure that advertisers using its targeting tools comply with the law. .

These are important steps in addressing the uploading issue, and we expect other platforms to follow suit.

But there is still a lot to do. Determining when discrimination is occurring online requires a solid independent audit, including the investigative journalism that exposed some of the practices in the first place. But researchers and journalists engaging in joint activities to test discrimination online may be subject to responsibility for violating the terms of use of the website.

Facebook has allowed some of the parties to the settlement to perform tests on Facebook’s advertising platform to ensure that Facebook complies with the agreement. But this kind of testing – and the monitoring of announcements posted by journalists and researchers – needs to be able to run unhindered on all platforms in the same way that audit testing has long been done in the offline world to do. respect civil rights laws.

Because Facebook is such a dominant player in online advertising, today’s regulation marks an important step in ensuring that we don’t lose our civil rights when we go online to find a house, a job, or a loan. . But we’ll continue to work to make sure those rights stay intact no matter where we click.

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