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Facebook Announces Sweeping Changes to Ad Targeting After Discrimination Settlement

“Anyone who wants to run housing, employment or credit ads will no longer be allowed to target by age, gender or zip code,” the company said.

Advertisers on Facebook can no longer target users by “age, gender and ZIP code” for job listings, housing advertisements, and credit offers. In order to settle five discrimination lawsuits against the social network, Facebook agreed to remove the targeting options after a ProPublica report found that housing ads had an option to exclude African Americans and Jewish people. The website also found Facebook job ads from companies like Uber and Verizon Wireless were excluding certain ages, genders, and other groups protected by federal law. “Anyone who wants to run housing, employment or credit ads will no longer be allowed to target by age, gender or zip code,” the company said in a blog post. “Advertisers offering housing, employment and credit opportunities will have a much smaller set of targeting categories to use in their campaigns overall.” The social network will also create a new housing advertisement page that will make all listings available, regardless of how advertisers targeted the ads. In addition to the changes, Facebook will reportedly have to pay $5 million to the plaintiffs in the lawsuits. In a Tuesday statement to ProPublica, the tech giant denied seeing the “kind of explicit discriminatory behavior that civil rights groups are concerned about.”