Startup Beat

Adding to Facebook’s catastrophic list of PR nightmares, Facebook has recently been accused of racial discrimination, among other forms of discrimination within its ads, and US regulators have targetted Facebook for this mistake.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently announced in an administrative complaint that Facebook violated the Fair Housing Act because its targeting systems allow advertisers to rule out certain audiences, such as families with young children or disabled people, from seeing housing ads.

Facebook has attempted to atone for this by eliminating over 5,000 ad targeting options in another bid to prevent discriminatory advertisements from appearing on its service. However, there is still a larger problem at play here. This active discrimination is still prevalent in advertising, as this recent Forbes article titled “How To Target Wealthy Consumers With Facebook’s New Stripped Down Demographic Options” demonstrates.

Understandably marketers want to sell to the right audience, which will naturally result in

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