Discriminatory Ads on Facebook

So it seems Facebook may have been violating federal housing laws by allowing marketers to target and exclude races in ads related to housing, employment and credit.

The company has been under pressure from U.S. lawmakers who have raised concerns that a Facebook feature allowing marketers to target users by “ethnic affinity” could be discriminatory.

While it isn’t possible to target someone specifically by race, Facebook does allow advertisers to market to people by what it calls “ethnic affinity.” There are six categories of ethnic affinity: African-American, Asian-American, and four types of Hispanic groups based whether they speak Spanish, English or both. Facebook also makes it possible to exclude users with one of these affinities from seeing an ad.

After facing waves of criticism regarding the whole issue Facebook says they will create an automated system in an effort to better filter out these discriminatory ads. While I understand how in this situation race-based ad targeting isn’t right, in most other cases it's an efficient way to reach relevant audiences, and I hope this doesn’t lead to more paranoia and an eventual phasing out of multicultural marketing in general. Thoughts?

Original WSJ article