“Using a computer to limit a person’s housing choices can be just as discriminatory as slamming a door in someone’s face," said Ben Carson, housing and urban development secretary. | AP Photo/Jacqueline Larma Technology HUD charges Facebook with housing discrimination, examines Google and Twitter

The Department of Housing and Urban Development on Thursday charged Facebook with violating fair housing laws by enabling discrimination on its advertising platform and confirmed that it is also examining Twitter and Google’s ad-targeting practices.

“Facebook is discriminating against people based upon who they are and where they live,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said in a statement. “Using a computer to limit a person’s housing choices can be just as discriminatory as slamming a door in someone’s face.”


The charges, which add to Facebook's growing list of problems in Washington, stem from an investigation launched by the agency in August. Multiple outside probes have found Facebook's ad-targeting capabilities let advertisers exclude people by gender, race, ethnicity and other categories.

HUD alleges that Facebook gave advertisers “a map tool to exclude people who live in a specified area from seeing an ad by drawing a red line around that area." That recalls the nation’s ugly history of “redlining” black neighborhoods on government maps, which encouraged mortgage lending discrimination before the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968.

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“Even as we confront new technologies, the fair housing laws enacted over half a century ago remain clear — discrimination in housing-related advertising is against the law,” HUD General Counsel Paul Compton said. “Just because a process to deliver advertising is opaque and complex doesn’t mean that it exempts Facebook and others from our scrutiny and the law of the land,” Compton added.

HUD is seeking injunctive relief, the “maximum civil penalty” for each violation of the Fair Housing Act and damages for injured parties, in addition to a requirement that Facebook retrain its employees on discrimination. The case will be heard by an administrative law judge.

A Facebook spokesperson said the company is “disappointed” in the decision, adding: “We've been working with them to address their concerns and have taken significant steps to prevent ad discrimination.”

A HUD official also said the agency is looking into Google and Twitter.

A Google spokesperson said the company has “had policies in place for many years that prohibit targeting ads on the basis of sensitive categories like race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, disability status, negative financial standing, etc. Our policies are designed to protect users and ensure that advertisers are using our platforms in a responsible manner. ”

A Twitter spokesperson said the company "doesn't allow discriminatory advertising on our platform. Someone using Twitter to advertise agrees to comply with the law and not use our services for illegal activities. Discrimination in housing and employment is against the law and against our rules."

The charges against Facebook came a little more than a week after COO Sheryl Sandberg announced that the company would no longer allow housing advertisers to target users with ads based on their age, gender or ZIP code. That move came as part of a nearly $5 million settlement between Facebook and organizations including the National Fair Housing Alliance and the American Civil Liberties Union, which had sued the company over its advertising practices.

Under the terms of the settlement, Facebook has six months to create a separate portal for housing, employment and credit advertisements with limited targeting options.

This is only the latest controversy to ensnare the Silicon Valley giant. Facebook is already more than a year into a Federal Trade Commission investigation probing its alleged repeated failures to protect user data. Lawmakers of both parties routinely lambaste the company for a raft of issues, including its data flaps; struggles to adequately serve a diverse workforce and user base; and the proliferation of misinformation on its platforms.

On Thursday, Facebook said it will ban white nationalist and white separatist content, moving to address longstanding criticism of how it handles online hate speech.

But housing discrimination presents special challenges. Part of the problem, according to civil-rights lawyers, is that algorithms and machine learning have transformed the way discrimination occurs. Last week’s settlement requires Facebook to engage external lawyers, researchers and academics to study and report back on algorithmic bias.

“In terms of reforming the platform, the next step is dealing with these issues on how the algorithms work,” said David Berman, one of the lawyers who represented NFHA in the case.

Facebook “uses machine learning and other prediction techniques to classify and group users so as to project each user’s likely response to a given ad. In doing so, [the company] inevitably recreates groupings defined by their protected class,” HUD said in today’s filing. “For example, the top Facebook pages users ‘like’ vary sharply by their protected class, according to Respondent’s ‘Audience Insights’ tool.”

“The whole field of housing discrimination is kind of changing,” said Judy Fox, the director of Notre Dame Law School’s Economic Justice Institute.

“It’s also more insidious in some ways; you can hide your discrimination if you’re doing it deliberately, and some people are,” Fox said. “Machine learning is fraught with problems — there’s a lot of research out there that basically a computer can be taught to discriminate, and we have to be careful of that. If you really only want a certain kind of person, the machine can learn that.”

“I do think it’s kind of a wake-up call to all of those online platforms that are doing similar things,” she added

HUD, meanwhile, has come under criticism for its own handling of fair housing issues. Carson announced in January 2018 that the agency would delay implementation of an Obama-era rule meant to crack down on housing discrimination, prompting civil rights groups to file suit.

In June, HUD announced that it was reconsidering the agency’s 2013 regulations applying the Fair Housing Act’s disparate impact standard, which holds businesses accountable for practices that disproportionately affect minorities even if no discrimination was intended.

Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the top Democrat on the Banking Committee, pointed to those two developments in calling on the administration to take a stronger stand against discrimination.

Brown said in a statement: “While I am glad that the Trump Administration reopened its investigation of Facebook after public outcry and questions from me and other lawmakers, this Administration has engaged in a troubling pattern of undermining bedrock tools that find and remedy systemic discrimination, like undoing regulations on the use of disparate impact analysis and HUD’s own Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule."

