Yeah, although it seems mostly to be by accident: you can target you facebook ads to whatever group you want, so your bra sales only target women, or your stroller offers only target people with smaller children.
Personally I think the law is bullshit: what is interesting, and what we want to prevent, isn't landlords who can target only some group, but landlords who _do_.
But I guess facebook makes for an interesting target.
Bras and strollers are not essentials for living. Housing is. That's why Fair Housing laws, and not "fair marketing" laws exist.
> what we want to prevent, isn't landlords who can target only some group, but landlords who _do_.
Sort of. Landlords will always, intentionally or unintentionally, target one group or the other, simply because they can't advertise literally everywhere. The important things are that the contents of the ads aren't discriminatory against protected classes, and they can in theory be seen by anyone who buys the right paper or sees the handbill or billboard or TV ad. FB's targeting appears to remove the possibility of equality of opportunity to view the ads. There's never a reason to allow filtering by protected classes on housing ads, so FB shouldn't have ever provided it as a feature whether directly or indirectly.
No. Because anyone can buy the WSJ and Teen Vogue and see the ad.
If you're excluded from being targeted by an FB ad you have no chance of seeing it. If that exclusion criteria forms the basis of a protected class and the ad in question relates to housing, that's illegal. So it's a very narrow set of behaviors that are wrong here, not all of ad targeting.
E.g. it's probably not illegal (or even morally wrong) to exclude someone who is interested in topics such as "Hinduism" from ads for beef jerky. Even though religion is a protected class, beef jerky isn't housing.
Similarly, it's (probably) not wrong to exclude low-income people from ads for your high-end condo because AFAIK income isn't a protected class.
I'm not sure it's that easy. The complaint dings Facebook for allowing targeting of ads by zip code. Isn't it the case in principle that people choose to live in certain areas? I don't think that discriminating on the basis of voluntary association that happens to correlate with protected group membership is enough to spare one from HUD's gaze.
Is that something that actually happens? Do people say "let's run this ad on teenvogue.com"? Don't websites (especially businesses of the scale of WSJ/vogue/etc) get their ads from ad networks?
It's easy in current ad targeting setups to limit an ad to running on particular sites or to prohibit an ad from running on certain sites.
If someone were to run an ad and configure the campaign such that it appeared on the Wall Street Journal website and not the Teen Vogue website, would this action have any different moral or legal character from deciding to run a print at in the Wall Street Journal instead of Teen Vogue?
Personally I think the law is bullshit: what is interesting, and what we want to prevent, isn't landlords who can target only some group, but landlords who _do_.
But I guess facebook makes for an interesting target.