Facebook Will Stop Some Ads From Targeting Users by Race

As Facebook has grown, so too has its ability to slice and dice the habits of its hundreds of millions of users, and offer them up to advertisers that want to reach specific groups for specific reasons. But while the social network has evolved to the point that it can target audiences as narrow as 18-to-24-year-old men in Connecticut who are in long-distance relationships, it has also created tools that allowed advertisers to discriminate against Americans in ways that were outlawed in the 1960s. Facebook responded on Friday to concern that it was violating anti-discrimination laws, announcing that marketers placing housing, employment or credit ads on the social network would no longer be able to use tools that target people by ethnicity. “There are many nondiscriminatory uses of our ethnic affinity solution in these areas, but we have decided that we can best guard against discrimination by suspending these types of ads,” Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said in a blog post on Friday.