Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race
Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude
Users by Race
After ProPublica revealed last year that Facebook
advertisers could target housing ads to whites only, the company announced it
had built a system to spot and reject discriminatory ads. We retested and found
major omissions.
by Julia Angwin, Ariana Tobin and Madeleine Varner Nov.
21, 1:23 p.m. EST
In February, Facebook said it would step up enforcement
of its prohibition against discrimination in advertising for housing,
employment or credit.
But our tests showed a significant lapse in the company’s
monitoring of the rental market.
Last week, ProPublica bought dozens of rental housing ads
on Facebook, but asked that they not be shown to certain categories of users,
such as African Americans, mothers of high school kids, people interested in
wheelchair ramps, Jews, expats from Argentina and Spanish speakers.
All of these groups are protected under 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.” Violators can face tens of thousands of dollars in
fines.
Every single ad was approved within minutes.
The only ad that took longer than three minutes to be
approved by Facebook sought to exclude potential renters “interested in Islam,
Sunni Islam and Shia Islam.” It was approved after 22 minutes.
Under its own policies, Facebook should have flagged
these ads, and prevented the posting of some of them. Its failure to do so
revives questions about whether the company is in compliance with federal fair
housing rules, as well as about its ability and commitment to police
discriminatory advertising on the world’s largest social network.
Facebook’s advertising portal lets users choose their
audiences based on specific traits, demographics and behavior profiles. Our ad
for an apartment rental excluded African Americans, Asian Americans and
Spanish-speaking Hispanic audiences. It was approved in under a minute.
Housing, employment and credit are the three areas in
which federal law prohibits discriminatory ads. However, the U.S. Department of
Housing and Urban Development — the agency responsible for enforcing fair
housing laws — told us that it has closed an inquiry into Facebook’s advertising
policies, reducing pressure on the company to address the issue. In a 2015
newspaper column, Ben Carson, now HUD secretary, criticized
“government-engineered attempts to legislate racial equality” in housing.
Facebook’s failure to police discriminatory rental ads
flies in the face of its promises in February that it would no longer approve
ads for housing, employment or credit that targeted racial categories. For
advertising aimed at audiences not selected by race, Facebook said it would
require housing, employment and credit advertisers to “self-certify” that their
ads were compliant with anti-discrimination laws.
Based on Facebook’s announcement, the ads purchased by
ProPublica that were aimed at racial categories should have been rejected. The
others should have prompted a screen to pop up asking for self-certification.
We never encountered a self-certification screen, and none of our ads were
rejected by Facebook.
“This was a failure in our enforcement and we’re
disappointed that we fell short of our commitments,” Ami Vora, vice president
of product management at Facebook, said in an emailed statement. “The rental
housing ads purchased by ProPublica should have but did not trigger the extra
review and certifications we put in place due to a technical failure.”
Vora added that Facebook’s anti-discrimination system had
“successfully flagged millions of ads” in the credit, employment and housing
categories and that Facebook will now begin requiring self-certification for
ads in all categories that choose to exclude an audience segment. “Our systems
continue to improve but we can do better,” Vora said.
About 37 percent of U.S. households rented in 2016,
representing a 50-year high, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies
of Harvard University. On average, renters earn about half as much as
homeowners, and the percentage of families with children that rent rather than
buy has increased sharply in the past decade, the study said. Minority renters
have long faced pervasive housing discrimination. A 2013 study by HUD found
that real estate agents show more units to whites than to African Americans,
Asians and Latinos.
Facebook has long been a popular destination for rental
listings, on pages hosted by real estate brokers, property owners and building
managers. Earlier this month, Facebook announced that it had added two large
providers of rental listings to its Facebook Marketplace service. “Marketplace
is a popular place for people to look for a home to rent,” Facebook product
manager Bowen Pan said in a press release.
Facebook warns rental advertisers in its Marketplace
section that “listings that discriminate against a protected class can be
reported and will be removed from Facebook.”
Facebook’s anti-discrimination initiative was prompted by
an article published last year by ProPublica. For that story, we bought a
Facebook ad targeting house hunters. We were able to use Facebook’s features to
block the ad from being shown to anyone with an “affinity” for African
American, Asian American or Hispanic people. Our ability to narrow the audience
based on race raised the question of whether such ads violated the Fair Housing
Act.
After ProPublica’s article appeared in the fall of 2016,
HUD, then under the Obama administration, began examining Facebook’s practices.
Facebook then said it would build an automated system to spot ads that
discriminate illegally. “We take these issues seriously,” Facebook Vice
President Erin Egan wrote in a blog post. “Discriminatory advertising has no
place on Facebook.”
In February, Facebook announced it had built its system
and was rolling it out. The press lauded the announcement: “Facebook cracks
down on ads that discriminate” was the Washington Post’s headline.
Facebook has been under fire for other aspects of its
automated ad buying system as well. Two months ago, the company disclosed that
it had discovered $100,000 worth of divisive political ads placed by
“inauthentic” Russian accounts. And in September, ProPublica reported that
Facebook’s ad targeting system allowed buyers to reach people who identified
themselves as “Jew haters” and other anti-Semitic categories. Facebook pledged
to remove the offending categories and to hire thousands more employees to
enforce its ad policies.
“We’re adding additional layers of review where people
use potentially sensitive categories for targeting,” Facebook General Counsel
Colin Stretch said during Senate testimony earlier this month.
After Stretch’s public statement, we wondered whether the
ability to buy discriminatory housing ads had really been addressed. So we set
out to buy an advertisement with the exact same targeting parameters as the ad
we bought last year. The ad promoted a fictional apartment for rent and was
targeted at people living in New York, ages 18–65, who were house hunting and
likely to move. We asked Facebook not to show the ad to people categorized
under the “multicultural affinity” of Hispanic, African American or Asian
American.
(ProPublica generally forbids impersonation in news
gathering. We felt in this instance that the public interest in Facebook’s ad
system justified the brief posting of a fake ad for non-existent housing. We
deleted each ad as soon as it was approved.)
The only changes from last year that we could identify in
Facebook’s ad buying system was that the category called “Ethnic Affinity” had
been renamed “Multicultural Affinity” and was no longer part of “Demographics.”
It is now designated as part of “Behaviors.”
Our ad was approved within minutes.
Then we decided to test whether we could purchase housing
ads that discriminated against other protected categories of people under the
Fair Housing Act.
We placed ads that sought to exclude members of as many
of the protected categories as we could find in Facebook’s self-service
advertising portal. In addition to those mentioned above, we bought ads that
were blocked from being shown to “soccer moms,” people interested in American
sign language, gay men and Christians.
We also tested whether it was possible to use geography
as a way to target racial groups — a practice known as redlining. We bought a
housing ad that targeted ZIP codes in Brooklyn whose residents are more than 50
percent non-Hispanic white people, according to the U.S. Census bureau. By
definition, that meant the ad was not shown to Facebook users living in
Brooklyn neighborhoods where minorities are a majority of the residents.
Facebook drew blue lines around our target neighborhoods
and told us our “audience selection is great!” It approved the ad.
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