Facebook Does Have to Respect Civil-Rights Legislation, After All

For most of Facebook’s existence, a prospective advertiser listing a job or a home or a loan could have kept the ad from reaching women or people over 55 or those with an “ethnic affinity” for African Americans. Yesterday, after more than two years of negotiations, the plaintiffs in five separate cases announced that they’d reached a settlement that will require Facebook to rebuild the way it sells advertising for housing, employment, and credit services. The company has committed to building “a separate advertising portal for creating housing, employment, and credit (‘HEC’) ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger that will have limited targeting options, to prevent discrimination,” by September, according to the National Fair Housing Alliance’s summary of the settlement.