Facebook accused of Fair Housing Act violation

Facebook hasn’t had an easy time recently with data breaches and allegations about election fraud and now the HUD alleges it has violated the Fair Housing Act.

The department has filed an official complaint claiming that Facebook has allowed landlords and home sellers to use its advertising platform to engage in housing discrimination.

It alleges that the platform’s tools which enable the targeting of advertising by several metrics, facilitate discrimination of potential homebuyers or tenants based on demographics such as ethnicity, race, or gender.

"The Fair Housing Act prohibits housing discrimination including those who might limit or deny housing options with a click of a mouse," said Anna María Farías, HUD's Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. "When Facebook uses the vast amount of personal data it collects to help advertisers to discriminate, it's the same as slamming the door in someone's face."

For example, HUD's complaint alleges Facebook's platform violates the Fair Housing Act. It enables advertisers to, among other things:

• display housing ads either only to men or women;
• not show ads to Facebook users interested in an "assistance dog," "mobility scooter," "accessibility" or "deaf culture";
• not show ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in "child care" or "parenting," or show ads only to users with children above a specified age;
• to display/not display ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in a particular place of worship, religion or tenet, such as the "Christian Church," "Sikhism," "Hinduism," or the "Bible."
• not show ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in "Latin America," "Canada," "Southeast Asia," "China," "Honduras," or "Somalia."
• draw a red line around zip codes and then not display ads to Facebook users who live in specific zip codes.

As well as the HUD complaint, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York filed a statement of interest Friday, joined in by HUD, in US District Court on behalf of a number of private litigants challenging Facebook's advertising platform.

Facebook response
At the time of writing, Facebook has not posted a response to the allegations on its usual news channels.

However, Facebook told CNN: “There is no place for discrimination on Facebook; it’s strictly prohibited in our policies. Over the past year we have strengthened our systems to further protect against misuse.”

It added that it will respond to the statement of interest in court and will work directly with HUD to address their concerns.

The allegations have not been proven in court.