Facebook’s parent company Meta and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) have agreed to a settlement over allegations the company engaged in discriminatory advertising.
Facebook discriminated by offering advertisers an algorithm that enabled advertisers to target ads to users based on their looks, sex, religion, and interests, according to a federal lawsuit.
That violated the Fair Housing Act when it was used by advertisements for housing, according to the DOJ.
Under the proposed settlement (pdf), announced on June 21, Meta will stop using the advertising tool that relies on the algorithm and develop a replacement tool.
The new tool must “address disparities for race, ethnicity and sex between advertisers’ targeted audiences and the group of Facebook users to whom Facebook’s personalization algorithms actually deliver the ads,” the DOJ said in a statement….