Facebook to Reconsider Ad Policy That Allows Viewer to be Excluded by Race

Facebook's system allows advertisers to target viewers on the basis of interests, backgrounds and ethnic affinities. The system offer options to exclude African-American, Asian-American or Hispanic people only, leaving white people the implicit default target audience.

However, federal law prohibits excluding people from seeing ads for housing, credit and employment by race, gender and other factors. The federal Fair Housing Act forbids organizations "to make, print, or publish, or cause to be made, printed, or published any notice, statement, or advertisement, with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin."

Journalists from ProPublica first uncovered the bias after a small investigation and published an article about Facebook's advertising policy. Facebook was slammed for the practice. Several users filed a lawsuit against the company and four members of Congress contacted it demanding to stop the policy.

Facebook responded with a plan for building a new system that would prohibit using "ethnic affinities" for ads within the next few months.

Steve Satterfield, privacy and public policy manager at Facebook, said, "We are going to have to build a solution to do this. It is not going to happen overnight."

The company stated that the system would also inject pop-up notices for advertisers saying they are attempting to violate the law and Facebook's ads policies.