Facebook’s Civil Rights Audit Chapter Five: Advertising Practices When so much of our world has moved online, Facebook’s advertising tools can have a significant impact. They can help small businesses find new customers and build their customer base, and can enable nonprofits and public service organizations to get important information and resources to the communities that need them the most. They also can determine whether one learns of an advertised, available job, housing, or credit opportunity, or does not. While recognizing that there are positive uses for advertising tools, the civil rights community has long been concerned that Facebook’s advertising tools could be used in discriminatory ways. Over the last few years, several discrimination lawsuits were filed against Facebook alleging that its ad tools allowed advertisers to choose who received their ads and, in doing so, permitted advertisers to discriminate by excluding people from seeing ads for housing, employment, or credit opportunities based gender, race, age, and other personal characteristics. In March 2019, Facebook settled discrimination lawsuits brought by the National Fair Housing Alliance, Communications Workers of America, the American Civil Liberties Union, and private parties. The June 2019 Audit Report described five major changes Facebook was making to its ad targeting system to prevent Facebook’s ad tools from being used for discrimination. This chapter provides updates on Facebook’s progress implementing these five commitments, describes new developments, and identifies areas for further analysis and improvement. First, Facebook agreed to build a separate advertising flow for creating US housing, employment, and credit (“HEC”) opportunity ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger with limited targeting options. Facebook states that it fulfilled this commitment in December 2019 when this flow became mandatory across all the tools businesses use to buy ads on Facebook. When an advertiser identifies their ad as offering housing, employment or credit, they are not permitted to target based on gender, age, or any interests that appear to describe people of a certain race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability status, or other protected class. They are also prohibited from targeting ads based on narrow location options, including ZIP code (which can correlate with protected class given residential segregation patterns). Facebook has made Lookalike targeting unavailable to advertisers using the HEC flow (Lookalike targeting is when an advertiser provides Facebook a customer list and Facebook identifies users who are similar to those on the list who are then targeted for advertising). Instead of Lookalike targeting, Facebook states that advertisers using the HEC flow are only able to create Special Ad Audiences — audiences selected based on similarities in online behavior and activity to those on a customer list but without considering age, gender, ZIP code or FB group membership. There has been some criticism or skepticism as to whether and how effectively Facebook will ensure that HEC ads are actually sent through the restricted flow (as opposed to sneaking into the old system where protected class targeting options remain available). Facebook indicates that it uses a combination of automated detection and human review to catch advertisers that may attempt to circumvent these restrictions. As part of its settlement, Facebook has committed to continuous refinement of the automated detection system so it is as effective as possible. 72