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Re:Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race by hairy_man674 on Friday October 28, 2016 @05:16PM (#12820794)
Caucasians are a category that can be selected from that list too, right? So, the article lead should be ammended from:

"Facebook’s system allows advertisers to exclude black, Hispanic, and other “ethnic affinities” from seeing ads."

To this:

"Facebook’s system allows advertisers to exclude white, black, Hispanic, and other “ethnic affinities” from seeing ads."

This is a good example of lying by omission. Ethically, there is nothing wrong with this system if the exclusion can be applied equally to any ethnic group.

And besides, we need this for practical reasons: there are special creams for people of certain pigments that won't work for my vanilla face...

Re:Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race by tambourine_man on Friday October 28, 2016 @05:27PM (#12820891)
> Caucasians are a category that can be selected from that list too, right?

Not according to Gruber[1]:

UPDATE: Their filter lets you screen out Asian-Americans, African-Americans, and Hispanics, but it doesn’t let you screen out white people? How did anyone at Facebook think this was a good idea?

[1]https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers...

Re:Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race by hairy_man674 on Friday October 28, 2016 @05:45PM (#12821028)
I don't use FB (privacy concerns and commercialization of human beings) so give the interested source benefit of the doubt.

So FB has made an oversight. The engineers and designers should do the politically correct thing here and add white people as a category. Most importantly, the special creams advertisers...

Re:Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race by acjohnson55 on Thursday November 03, 2016 @02:30PM (#12866592)
That doesn't really solve the problem of them explicitly creating a platform for discriminatory advertising.

This is also the sort of thing where I have to ask, how many people of color were apart of the design and implementation of this functionality?

Re:Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race by amelius on Friday October 28, 2016 @07:16PM (#12821592)
> Ethically, there is nothing wrong with this system if the exclusion can be applied equally to any ethnic group.

That is only shifting the responsibility to the person clicking (or not clicking) the checkbox.

Re:Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race by hairy_man674 on Friday October 28, 2016 @10:20PM (#12822280)
... thereby exonerating Facebook from the racial discrimination imputed to its advertising problem.

Are you really suggesting that platform providers are fully accountable for the abusive use of their services?

Re:Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race by sverige on Saturday October 29, 2016 @09:09AM (#12823773)
It shouldn't be an option. So yes, they are accountable.