Facebook Faces a Reckoning for Redlining

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/opinion/facebook-discrimination-civil-rights.html

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The automated decision systems that are pervasive in banking, the criminal justice system and the tech sector can easily amplify forms of discrimination that were once attributable to human bias only. The Department of Housing and Urban Development spoke to this problem on Thursday when it charged Facebook with violating the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by permitting advertisers to restrict access to housing ads based on user characteristics like race, religion or national origin.

This HUD filing resembles a similar suit filed last year by fair housing groups with which Facebook forged a sweeping settlement this month. Nevertheless, federal involvement puts tech companies on notice that they can be held accountable for civil rights violations connected with the ostensibly “neutral” systems they use to decide which readers see which material.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was partly intended to compensate for housing discrimination inflicted by the federal government itself, as it had previously shut most African-Americans out of homeownership through redlining. That practice entailed drawing lines around black neighborhoods and declaring them unsafe for federally backed mortgage insurance.

The act outlawed housing discrimination on paper, but the federal government has consistently dragged its feet in enforcing it, leaving most of the work to private groups that have frequently mounted court challenges to housing discrimination — and the government’s failure to fight it. In recent years, these groups have increasingly focused on the question of whether online services are replicating longstanding biases by using algorithms to target specific users.

HUD this week charged Facebook with central violations of the fair housing law, including allowing advertisers to exclude specific groups. Echoing the language of the period when the government itself was the bad actor, HUD asserts that Facebook allowed advertisers to “exclude people who live in a specified area from seeing an ad by drawing a red line around that area.”

HUD filed this suit just as Facebook was trumpeting the settlement it had forged in the 2018 discrimination suit filed by a coalition of fair housing groups led by the National Fair Housing Alliance. Their suit also argued that the company’s advertising platform permitted landlords and real estate brokers to exclude women, families with children and other protected classes of people from receiving housing ads.

That settlement includes a long list of changes. Among other things, it requires the company to create a separate portal for housing, credit and employment ads; create a page where Facebook users can view all housing ads placed by advertisers; allow testing on the platform to make sure that the settlement is effectively implemented; and work with the National Fair Housing Alliance on a training program to educate employees on fair housing and fair lending laws.

Facebook, which says it was surprised by the HUD suit, argues that it has already taken “significant steps” to prevent advertising discrimination, such as removing age, gender and ZIP code targeting from housing, credit and employment ads. It further said that it was eager to reach an agreement with HUD — as it did with the fair housing coalition — but that the agency had insisted on access to “sensitive information.”

The HUD suit against Facebook could well be just the beginning of the government’s inquiries into this problem. The New York Times reported Thursday that HUD officials had recently drafted letters to executives of Google and Twitter asking if they would be willing to discuss fair housing issues.

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