
Facebook will remove 5,000 ad targeting categories to limit discrimination - anigbrowl
https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/21/17764480/facebook-ad-targeting-options-removal-housing-racial-discrimination
======
bertil
It sounds like they are not removing the category but the ability to exclude
members from those categories from any ad. This shows that they didn’t trust
real-estate agents to declare their ads as related to housing. I’m wondering
if that means that they don’t expect to be able to target ads on political
topics, and maintain the requirements on proving your identity.

------
Spivak
This doesn't seem like it's really addressing the core problem which is that
Facebook is wholly responsible for the ads on their platform but getting away
with having little to no human involvement in vetting them. Somehow they've
convinced legislators that if advertisers don't have the ability to target
specific demographics and they have a ToS that asks advertisers to pretty
please not discriminate then Facebook is not-in-theory-but-in-practice
absolved of their liability and can remove discriminatory ads ex post facto.

Now look, I sympathize with Facebook here because above a certain scale it
becomes impossible to police just about any community and advertisers are
really no exception but I don't think the takeaway should be to change the
rules just because some process doesn't scale, surely there has to be some
middle ground.

------
crb002
Isn't discrimination the point of Facebook targeting? They could easily throw
a warning if the set you are hitting is out of protected class ratios for the
geographic neighborhoods and you could randomly sample around them to fix
bias.

