IME, money doesnt corrupt a person’s charakter that much as such.
But what it does is making it come to light, enabling it to show its true colours.
Quite a lot of people don’t behave as the assholes they actually are simply because they can’t afford to do so, in every possible sense of afford.
YMMV, of course.
The logical conclusion is that at some point, Zuckerberg will run for president.
Only faux billionaires run for President- real ones just buy them.
Okay, I’ll bite. Why is targeted practice covered by „the federal Fair Housing Act, which makes it illegal to publish any advertisement `with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin.’”
I assume that the ads themselves do not mention “No Irish need apply” or somesuch,
Are there church papers in the US? Small pamphlets that target the members of a parish, reporting on what’s going on in their group? Are home-sellers or their agents forbidden to advertise there?
I don’t think it is - at least not what was quoted.
I agree with you, the ads don’t seem to have said no Spanish speakers. They “just” wanted perfectly legal ads not to be shown to Spanish speakers, etc.
The ad itself wasn’t targeted. Where/to whom it was shown was.
Looking at the Fair Housing Act, that doesn’t seem to be directly covered.
Much as I hate to say it, it looks to me as though what the advertisers and Facebook did was perfectly legal.
Despicable but legal.
I suppose one could argue that by asking for the ad not to be shown to various groups, it became an advertisement that indicated a limitation based on race, etc, etc. but I think that’s stretching it.
The advertisement itself does not do any of that.
I don’t know what US case law says about that.
Any law which would make what Facebook did illegal would probably also prevent:
Distribution of those free “real estate” ad magazines in some neighborhood stores, unless distributed in all of them.
A realtor’s posting pictures and listings in its office window, if the office is on a street not frequented by proportional numbers of all ethnicities.
Posting “apartment for rent” notices on an office bulletin board if the workforce is not ethnically balanced.
Agreed, it’s hard to see how you could effectively legislate against those sorts of things being misused.
This is rather different.
It is obviously easy enough to legislate against being able to explicitly use the protected characteristics to exclude people from seeing your advert.
I see this as the online equivalent of a builder buying billboard space to advertise a new development, in the course of which few or no billboards are put up in minority neighborhoods. No one is stopping minority commuters from driving through those white neighborhoods and seeing the advertisement, in the same way that no minority Facebooker who does not explicitly identify as a minority in his/her Facebook profile would not see the real estate ads in question. That would make such a law tough to write IMO.
Not being a Facebook user, I may be mis-stating the way its targeted ads work, and I welcome informed correction. Personally, if I were on FB, I’d want to find out some keywords I could put in my profile that would make all advertisers stay away.
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Way too much. However, I’m perfectly okay with changing the law that it forbids un-targetting by these criteria.
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Well, unusual as this is for me, I think this is one of those cases where a meat-space analogy really doesn’t help much.
That might be so if only Facebook didn’t persist in trying to pigeonhole its users regardless of what the user tells them about themselves. Facebook is of course not alone in this and there have been any number of articles on this site explaining how to (try to) find out what profile various organisations have built up of you for advertising purposes.
Effectively what Facebook does is corral its users into different ghettoes.
You can be in several ghettoes at the same time though and the billboard can be set to show its ad only to people in certain ghettoes or to not show it to people in certain ghettoes or combinations of ghettoes.
So if you want to target your ad at left handed shoe-salesmen who live in a particular area in Topeka and like woodworking, kayaking and real ale, you can set up a billboard right outside their house.
You can supposedly set it up so that if they live next to a left-handed shoe-salesman who is into kayaking, woodwork but not real ale, he does not even know there is a billboard there. He never even sees it.
Or you can show the ad to everyone, or to left-handed people, or shoe-salesmen or any sub-division you like.
What Facebook allows you to do is to say show this advert to people earning more than $800,000, who like martinis, expensive watches, yachts and are looking for a house but DON’T show the ad to black people, Hispanics, Trump supporters, yodellers or euphonium players.
Deciding not to advertise your product in certain areas may be practically discriminatory but it at least allows any benighted denizen of your unwanted zone who manages to wander within sight of your ad to see it.
Facebook’s way of doing it means that that person will never see your ad.
At least that is what they promise.
Yup, I think a lot of people would be with you on that. Strangely enough Facebook doesn’t like that idea 
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All good points. Thanks.
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I am liberal / progressive and live the multi-ethnic sprawl of Los Angeles. However, I do not see this as actually illegal. To use a physical world analogy, let’s say I advertise a property in a Beverly Hills based publication or billboard, but I do not advertise in generally poorer areas such as Compton or East Los Angeles. I can understand people being upset with Facebook, but I personally do not think this is such a big deal.
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You’re quite wrong. 42 U.S.C. 3604( c) makes it illegal
To make, print, or publish, or cause to be made, printed, or published any notice, statement, or advertisement, with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin, or an intention to make any such preference, limitation, or discrimination.
You’re focused on the fact that the advertisement itself doesn’t contain the discriminatory indication; rather it was made only to Facebook. But such a statement was still made, and in a way that clearly implicates the purpose of this law. The case law supports this. For instance, under HUD v. Denton, the violating statement took the form of an eviction notice. In Mayers v. Ridley, it was the recording of a deed with a racially restrictive covenant. The latter example is important, as it established that such a statement does not need to be addressed to a person seeking housing.
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No, it wasn’t. It is another statement.
Do me the courtesy of actually making your argument, please.
I made those arguments above and I already wrote that discriminatory ad-targeting should be explicitly covered by the law.
The section you mention says “To make, print, or publish, or cause to be made, printed, or published any notice, statement, or advertisement, with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination…”
That wording puts the discriminatory statement into the ad itself. Not into the selection where it is published.
You can argue that this is irrelevant with regards to how a court will judge and you may even be right, but courts aren’t usually bound by logic.
Thank you - you’re right. It’s covered by the last bit “or an intention to make any such preference, limitation, or discrimination.”
I think that part is a little obscure as far as whether it is the advert itself which has to either be discriminatory or show an intention to discriminate but even if the advert itself does not necessarily indicate any preference, limitation, etc. but the instruction to Facebook not to show the ad to protected groups is itself a statement made by the advertiser which is covered by the Act and clearly does show an intention to discriminate and is therefore prohibited.
The cases john_c referred to do make it clear that US courts are prepared to take quite a wide view of what is covered by the Act.
HUD v. Denton:
(Assuming I’ve got the right ones? @john_c)
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@L0ki has already covered the substance of the matter very well. Thank you!
Oh really? How many opinions have you read in your lifetime?
edited: perhaps a nicer response would be: what gives you that idea?
To be fair, they’re not bound by logic - not common law courts at least. Precedent and statute, yes (in theory at least).
Logic, no.
They do tend to try and at least pay it lip service. 
