Meta Settles Claims That Ads Violated U.S. Fair Housing Laws

Meta Platforms Inc. will change its ad delivery system to address concerns that it violates the Fair Housing Act by discriminating against users, as part of a settlement with a federal regulator. The accord resolves a lawsuit by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development alleging that the algorithms used in Meta's advertising systems allowed marketers to violate fair housing laws by limiting or blocking certain groups of people from seeing housing ads on the service. "Because of this ground-breaking lawsuit, Meta will--for the first time--change its ad delivery system to address algorithmic discrimination," Manhattan US Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. Meta said Tuesday that it built machine learning technology to ensure that ads reach people that reflect the overall potential audience for a particular ad, and not just a subset of that group. In a blog post, Meta wrote that it will "work to ensure the age, gender and estimated race or ethnicity of a housing ad's overall audience matches the age, gender, and estimated race or ethnicity mix of the population eligible to see that ad."