Professor Olivier Sylvain wrote an op-ed in The New York Times explaining how the latest housing discrimination lawsuits against Facebook provide an initial blueprint for a path forward on big tech reform. Professor Sylvain was a consultant to the lawyers in National Fair Housing Alliance v. Facebook, one of the cases that settled last week.
Before the Department of Housing and Urban Development on Thursday announced that it has charged Facebook with violating the Fair Housing Act by enabling advertisers to engage in housing discrimination, Facebook said that it would change its ad-targeting methods to forbid discriminatory advertisements about housing, employment and credit opportunities. This plan, announced last week, is part of its settlement agreement with the civil rights groups that filed suits against the company over the past few years. The substantive terms are not radical. But they outline a basic framework for how policymakers might begin thinking about reforming big tech in ways that are suited to our times.
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Ever since reporting revealed in October of 2016 that Facebook allowed advertisers to exclude users by race, the company has denied any legal wrongdoing. If there is a problem under law, its leaders have said, it is with advertisers. That is why Facebook could claim that it was attending to discrimination by requiring advertisers to certify that they were not violating civil rights laws. But this was always unconvincing…
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Under the 1996 Communications Decency Act, online intermediaries have enjoyed a broad immunity from liability for the illicit online conduct of their users and advertisers.
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The internet is no longer just a medium for newsgroups and electronic bulletin boards, which were the conduits for authentic user-generated content that the drafters of the C.D.A. had in mind two decades ago. Today, intermediaries design services that control practically all aspects of users’ online experiences. Targeted advertising is just one example. We should accordingly expect them to take far more responsibility for what happens on their platforms.
