The Trump administration is stepping up its scrutiny into whether Silicon Valley giants are enabling housing discrimination online.
The administration has already brought charges against Facebook and is investigating both Twitter and Google.
The moves mark a significant escalation in regulators’ efforts to apply federal civil rights law to online advertising and is creating a surprising alliance between watchdog groups and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. Experts say that if regulators step up enforcement, companies could be forced to significantly overhaul their lucrative ad-targeting strategies.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) surprised tech watchers last week by charging Facebook, one of the world’s largest players in online advertising, with encouraging and enabling housing discrimination through its targeted advertising practices. The agency argued that the practices allowed realtors and landlords to exclude certain demographics from seeing housing ads.
HUD also accused Facebook of excluding women, minorities, disabled populations and other protected groups from seeing certain ads even when the advertiser did not intend to do so.
A HUD official confirmed to The Hill that the agency at the end of last year sent letters requesting meetings with Google and Twitter to talk about their housing advertisement practices.
Lawmakers hailed the move and said they would be watching the probe closely.
“I think HUD has an obligation to look at all platforms to ensure that these algorithms don’t allow, or even accelerate, discrimination,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told The Hill. “The ability to target ads is essential for their business models but if they’re targeting ads in such a way that prevents people from getting a public service, that’s not just wrong, it’s against the law.”
The Congressional Black Caucus, which for years urged regulators to look into whether Facebook’s ad-targeting practices were discriminatory, told The Hill that it is “monitoring” HUD’s probes into Twitter and Google.
“We believe all companies should be compliant with any federal law that combats and prevents any form of discrimination,” said Gabrielle Brown, spokeswoman for the caucus, in a statement.
The agency’s moves surprised many Trump administration critics who say officials have not done enough on civil rights enforcement. And for tech companies, it opened a new front for an industry already under immense scrutiny from Washington.
But watchdog groups welcomed the actions and noted that alleged discrimination is not a new problem for the tech industry.
Advertisers dealing with housing, employment and credit will now be held to different standards on Facebook. They will not be allowed to target users based on age, gender or zip code, and they will have far fewer microtargeting options that could be used as proxies to exclude protected classes.
“With Google and Twitter, we definitely would see similar concerns,” Miranda Bogen, a senior policy analyst with digital civil rights group Upturn, told The Hill. “Any ad platform that allows this sort of ad-targeting, or that tries to optimize delivery to the right kind of people, will have to grapple with the same sort of issues that Facebook has been called out for.”
“That’s something regulators have been attentive to,” Bogen said. “It’s not appropriate to exclude parents with kids from certain types of housing.”
If users see an advertisement that could violate the law on Twitter, they are encouraged to report it to the company, but civil rights lawyers argue that is not enough.
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