The social giant Facebook has earlier introduced ethnic affinity ad-targeting option which identifies people who may be interested in specific topics regarding certain ethnicity. The tool allows advertisers to purchase ads where they can choose to exclude certain ethnic affinities.
Race and ethnics are sensitive materials, so then the feature caught a lot of negative attentions, including those from members of Congress and the New York-based non-profit news organization ProPublica. The feature was said to drew attention towards discriminating against people on certain races.
Since Facebook never ask for race identification, the company uses users Likes and activities to group them under different ethnic categories. This, according to a civil right lawyer, violates the Fair Housing Act and Civil Right of 1964.
A few days after the investigation, a class-action lawsuit was then brought against Facebook.
After facing backlash over the tool, on November 11th, 2016, Facebook announced that it will prohibit the use of racial and ethnic filters in some of the instances. But rather than eliminating the feature entirely, Facebook only suspend the tool to those groups that have historically been subjected to discrimination.
"We will disable the use of ethnic affinity marketing for ads that we identify as offering housing, employment, or credit," wrote Erin Egan, Facebook's VP of U.S. public policy and Chief Privacy Officer.
In order to identify problematic ads, Facebook will still be using its standard reviewing process it currently use to fight discrimination on the social network. But on top of that, Facebook is adding "educational materials" where advertisers can adhere to the new measures.
In its defense, Facebook said that the social network wasn't doing any racial profiling. What it did, was simply highlighting users who responded well to certain ethnic content. "They like African-American content. But we cannot and do not say to advertisers that they are ethnically black," the company said.
It also denied that the "ethnic affinity" provision was discriminatory. And when questioned by ProPublica about why the category resides under the "demographics" section, Facebook said that plans to move the category to another section, but did not say it would eliminate it.
However, to relieve the pressure, Facebook said that it would build tools to "detect and automatically disable" the use of this type of marketing for some ads purchased on the site. But "multicultural marketing" will still permitted however. This kind of filtering will help "promote inclusion of underrepresented communities" by tailoring the ads to them, according to Facebook.
"There are many non-discriminatory uses of our ethnic affinity solution in these areas, but we have decided that we can best guard against discrimination by suspending these types of ads," said Egan.