How Facebook’s Ad Tool Fails to Protect Civil Rights

Facebook’s ability to let advertisers target a specific audience—for instance, women between the ages of 25 and 34 with young children—is its primary strength. More and more advertisers count on being able to identify, and market to, very specific groups. But Facebook’s advertising system not only allows marketers to choose who they most want to see their ads—it also allows them choose entire groups who will never see their ads. When placing an ad on Facebook, advertisers can explicitly exclude lots of groups, including people with any given educational level, financial status, political affiliation, and—perhaps most disturbingly—“ethnic affinity.”

"Targeting ads for housing, credit, or employment based upon race, gender, or sexual orientation violates the federal civil-rights laws that cover those fields—the Fair Housing Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and Title VII,” says Rachel Goodman, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union. “If Facebook is going to allow advertisers to target ads toward or away from users based on these sensitive characteristics, it must at the very least prohibit targeting in these three areas central to economic prosperity.” A better ad-buying platform might involve a system under which ads in areas where the U.S. has key civil-rights legislation—such as housing, credit, or employment—that also include ethnic targeting automatically get flagged for review. That type of due diligence already exists in the industry.