Facebook Statement on Discriminatory Rental Ads Purchased by
ProPublica
This was a failure in our enforcement and we’re disappointed that we fell
short of our commitments. Earlier this year, we added additional safeguards
to protect against the abuse of our multicultural affinity tools to facilitate
discrimination in housing, credit and employment.
The rental housing ads purchased by ProPublica should have but did not
trigger the extra review and certifications we put in place due to a technical
failure. Our safeguards, including additional human reviewers and machine
learning systems have successfully flagged millions of ads and their
effectiveness has improved over time.
Tens of thousands of advertisers have confirmed compliance with our tighter
restrictions, including that they follow all applicable laws. We don’t want
Facebook to be used for discrimination and will continue to strengthen our
policies, hire more ad reviewers, and refine machine learning tools to help
detect violations.
Our systems continue to improve but we can do better. While we currently
require compliance notifications of advertisers that seek to place ads for
housing, employment, and credit opportunities, we will extend this
requirement to ALL advertisers who choose to exclude some users from
seeing their ads on Facebook to also confirm their compliance with our antidiscrimination policies – and the law.
-- Ami Vora, VP Product Management, Facebook