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Comment by mastax | Hacker News Reader

42 U.S. Code § 3604.

...it shall be unlawful—

(c) To make, print, or publish, or cause to be made, printed, or published any notice, statement, or advertisement, with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap,familial status, or national origin, or an intention to make any such preference, limitation, or discrimination.

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Yep.

>or cause to be made...

Key words here.

Sure, the government should be going after individual advertisers too, but selective prosecution or not, Facebook is clearly in violation.

>Sure, the government should be going after individual advertisers too

They probably will.

But in this instance it’s much more appropriate the end FBs illegal business practices, rather than continuing to go after ad creators in perpetuity. Turn off the water and fix the leak instead of catching the drops, similar theory to local police flipping low level drug dealers to go after the suppliers.

Exactly, and the net effect of a single action against Facebook is greater than hundreds of actions against individual discriminatory landlords.Facebook can clean up it's act and prevent (to the best of its ability) legally discriminatory ads, which would deal a huge blow to those individuals who would have committed future discrimination.

How did Facebook cause this to be made? The wording implies that it's meant to address the administrators that demanded such an ad be made. The ones who decided to make it. Who caused it to be made.

Facebook is just the hardware store in this sense. They provide tools. And you make the billboard. They did not cause this to be made.

edit: They still may be responsible for publishing it, which is illegal. I would think its a much better argument to go after them for that then the 'cause' to be made' argument.

The point is that it doesn't matter whether Facebook was involved in the creation of the ads, whether they support the ads, or anything else. They have a duty not to allow their platform to be used in this way, and until recently, they were failing to do that.

Maybe. Or maybe not. Can you find/cite the law that requires that?

edit: ah. tunnel vision. yes the other parts of the statute would cover FB as partially culpable here. particularly the 'publish' part.

It's right above in this subthread.

"To make, print, or publish, or cause to be made, printed, or published"

Facebook likely restricts and prevents other kinds of illegal ads. Why shouldn't they be responsible for restricting and preventing this kind of illegal ad?

It's unreasonable to require a private company to do the governments job of policing and enforcing laws.

Nobody would consider forcing hammer manufactures to police their customers not to hurt people with said hammers either

This is a nonsensical comparison. Facebook is the party that is serving these ads, using their own proprietary methodology for targeting. It's not like these consumers are printing fliers and distributing them on their own. Everything that is happening is happening 'within Facebook's house' so-to-speak.

It's unreasonable to not require a private company to adhere to the law. If you sell hammers, they must meet the laws about hammers, tools, and general goods. If the hammer is unfit for purpose -- say, because the heads are not firmly attached and a user might unwittingly hurt themselves -- that's the company's fault.

If the ad selection tools are unfit for purpose -- say because it allows a user to target/untarget recipients in a blatantly illegal manner -- that's the company's fault.

Fine, it's not their job to police the law. However, every time they break the law by publishing one of these ads, HUD fines them if they're caught. It's illegal to publish the ad, not just create it. They can't host illegal ads on their site.

Can we agree to this compromise?

Facebook isn't manufacturing hammers. They're offering their hammering services. If you say "sure, we'll hammer some people for the right price," you're offering illegal hitman services.

There have always been specific laws governing what publishers could publish when it came to real estate and employment.

It's really an argument of platform vs publisher. Google, Facebook, and others have been treated as platforms (it's really what the DMCA protected). But as they have been grown larger, governments want to treat them more like publishers and hold them accountable for the content that they put on their site (treating them more like publishers).

Probably some truth to that.

Also likely the reason you'll start to see a shift over time in Facebook and Google's business models. They won't just allow any old thing on their servers any more.

It seems to me that Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc all want to be treated like a publisher -- they keep making publisher like decisions on who can and who cannot use their platform in whatever way that they decide.

Sort of like CBS or Fox can and do decide what kind of ads they would or they would not air.

I think Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc are going to find out that by being a publisher one has to actually act as a publisher all the time and not just when it is convenient.

> They provide tools. And you make the billboard.

Facebook caused the advertisements to not show for protected groups. The "tools" ran on their servers, not yours, so they are responsible for the outcome.

Providing the tools to specifically do terrible things makes you liable.

This comes up rather often but the "disruptor economy" style business that try and replace existing things that are burdened by regulations and other boring things with shiny new things with Vue, rounded corners, blinking lights and a lack of those regulations are, in fact, totally responsible for their failure to adhere to those regulations.

I feel like D&D and friends are ultimately partially to blame here, and their long (and wonderful, I'm not knocking table top RPGs) history of encouraging pedantic rules lawyering. The US legal code isn't like a tabletop RPG where if nothing specifically says your Thri-Kreen can't quadra-wield bastard swords with monkey grip then go ahead - when laws fail to specifically address situations then the courts are present to try and sanely interpret the intent of the original law and apply it to the new situation.

That's sort of like how murder is illegal, instead of it being illegal to hit someone on the head with a garbage can, hit someone on the head with a tire iron, hit someone on the head with a crow bar... "Murder" isn't an action you can take without a lot of abstract assumptions.

So perhaps Facebook is like a hardware store that sells the...

  Burgler Bundle - a complete set of a ski-mask, crow bar, knife and lockpick set
  (do note "Burgler Bundles" are not intended for burglery, theft, larceny
  or other crimes, by purchasing the markers of the "Burgler Bundle"
  are hereby absolved of responsibility for any law breaking committed)

Trying to manufacture or sell that in the store would probably get you arrested (unless done in a valid parody form I guess?) similarly Facebook set up tools here to make it absolutely trivial to break some laws "Oh but we didn't realize we were breaking any laws officer" - welp, that's why newspapers and such have legal departments that review ads being placed in them, skipping that step to save money doesn't absolve you from guilt.

None of which is actually alleged. The allegation is that FB allowed ad targeting, not that they allowed ads that "indicated a preference... or an intention to make any such preference". It's classic regulatory overreach over the course of 50 years, from disallowing ads that explicitly forbid blacks, to forbidding advertising in venues that haven't paid their diversity tax.

Targeting an ad specifically to avoid certain races indicates your intention to make such a preference. You're just telling Facebook you don't want those races rather than putting it in the actual ad text.

I forgot, legally you're supposed to take the upsell on your ad package so you can target based on a love of kayaking and golden retrievers. (This is what I mean by "diversity tax".)

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