I have to disagree with you on that. I'd put money on targeting a housing advertisement toward someone with a preference for organic food to be ruled discriminatory within five years. It's an unavoidable logical consequence of the logic driving today's complaint.
If there's an organic restaurant or grocer in a neighborhood, it makes sense to market to those who prefer organic food. There's nothing stopping anyone of any race or background from preferring organic food other than price or education/awareness etc.
Short of laws that ban targeted advertising in general, there will never be a law saying that you can't target people with some consumer preference.
If you tried to avoid black folks by not showing an ad to people who like stereotypical black consumer products, you'd be more likely to get away with it. There would be some burden of proof that you were doing this as a proxy for the protected class.
The core point is that our laws are more likely to have effective loopholes that undermine the actual intention than to have slippery slopes that take the intention and go way too far with it.
The law already exists if that will happen as you say, it will happen no matter what FB does.
So why should FB get to ignore the law unlike thousands of other businesses? Why do they get an exception?
My original point (which has now been downvoted into oblivion, presumably because it raises uncomfortable questions) is that we as an industry need to ask the question "What next?". We know that these regulations will not in fact stop housing discrimination and that more will follow.
It's disappointing that we're unable to have a frank discussion of this subject, since it's important both legally and economically. All the responses in this thread have essentially been that we shouldn't ask "What next?" because the "next" part hasn't happened yet. That's just ostrich-in-sand thinking.
We don’t know that. I imagine if that was true it would have been proved clearly in the last 40 years. But the law still exists. I’ve not aware of attempts to repeal it.
> and that more will follow.
Again, we’ve had 40 years for this.
So many people in this thread arguing against HUD seem to be trying to argue like this law is something new, like a soda tax, that has very little history or case law. Where the best we can do is hypotheticals. That’s not the case.
> It's disappointing that we're unable to have a frank discussion of this subject
I find it scary that we’re having a discussion. As I see it the story is ‘FB refuses to comply with 40 year old law’, and there are a lot of people arguing they don’t like the idea behind the law so why should they?
Because it’s a 40 year old law. It’s been to the Supreme Court at least once (2015). You don’t get to choose to ignore it because you don’t like it and then get mad when the government tried to punish you for it.
> All the responses in this thread have essentially been that we shouldn't ask "What next?" because the "next" part hasn't happened yet
FHA was 1968. So 50 years, not 40. We have 50 years of ‘next’ to look at.
> That's just ostrich-in-sand thinking.
What is ignoring 50 years of impact and acting like we don’t know how the law would be enforced?
Again? My read of this story was purely as a ‘tech giant decides to ignore he law because they can get away with it’ and had nothing to do with the law in question.
I should have expected HN to see it as ‘poor company bullied by law that theoretically may be problematic based on someone’s beliefs’. I’ve been here far long enough. I should have known. But I didn’t. I looked at the thread. Sigh.
