The federal government is keen to get Big Tech under control. During an interview on SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Daily on Tuesday, Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson said that HUD, the Department of Justice, and other agencies have their “antennae up” for how technological advancements enable new forms of discrimination.
HUD is currently suing Facebook for violating the 1968 Fair Housing Act by “encouraging, enabling, and causing housing discrimination” through its ad platform. Carson told Breitbart that HUD is starting with Facebook because there was clear evidence of discrimination.
Evidence of discrimination
“Well we have to start with someone. There was clear cut evidence that they were allowing their advertising platform to be used in a discriminatory manner,” Carson explained.
“There were blatant things like a button you could push that would exclude all women, or exclude all men, and these are protected classes,” he continued. “You simply can’t do that. There are others, obviously, who are going to be watching with great interest and hopefully modifying what they do so it won’t be necessary to pursue everybody, hopefully.”
Carson talks Facebook lawsuit
In the lawsuit filed last week, HUD accused Facebook of allowing advertisers to exclude certain users from seeing housing ads based on their zip code, gender, and myriad other protected class groupings. The agency accused Facebook of “discriminat[ing] based on race, color, national origin, religion, familial status, sex, and disability by restricting who can view housing-related ads on Facebook’s platforms and across the internet” and mining data to “determine which of its users view housing-related ads based, in part, on these protected characteristics.”
HUD further alleges that Facebook gives advertisers the option to show ads to only men or women and even allows advertisers “to exclude people based upon their neighborhood by drawing a red line around those neighborhoods on a map.” Carson described the alleged discrimination as the next trend in a long history of racist housing practices that led to segregation, like redlining, in which banks would refuse to offer services to minority communities.
“Some people say that it’s widespread. Well, it was widespread decades ago…redlining neighborhoods, it was widespread ‘whites only’ signs when it came to real estate,” he told Breitbart News editor-in-chief and radio host Alex Marlow. “So we obviously need to deal with that as we strengthen and bring true fairness to our communities, not just fairness for people who agree with a certain ideology, but for everybody.”
HUD began investigating Facebook this summer. The HUD complaint came less than a week after Facebook said that it would address issues with targeted advertising to prevent discrimination in a separate settlement over housing discrimination allegations with the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups.
Facebook said it was “surprised” by Carson’s lawsuit and that they were working to address the issue. But Carson said that Facebook, which has been criticized for handling its various scandals in an opaque fashion, can’t be trusted to fix the problem. Facebook gets most of its revenue from its advertising platform, which generates billions of dollars in profits.
“That’s the reason we’re pursuing this, even though some of the other complainants have been satisfied, we’re not satisfied, because you’re basically saying, ‘We’ll take care of it, just trust us, we’re good guys and we understand what’s going on,’ well that really would not be responsible for us to just assume that, we need to make absolutely sure that their practices are in compliance with the law, and until we’re satisfied that that’s the case, we will continue to pursue this on behalf of the people.”
Big Tech backlash
Facebook has been at the epicenter of a Big Tech backlash as it faces accusations of censoring conservatives and abusing user data. Data mining is core to Facebook’s advertising platform, which uses data to pinpoint advertisements to consumers, but critics say that Facebook’s practices enable discrimination against users. Carson said that it’s important to remain “vigilant” about how technological advances enable new forms of racism and that the federal government will have its “antenna up” to track new forms of discrimination.
“I think that’s why the Department of Justice and other agencies have their antenna up too, and we all have to keep our antenna up, recognizing that things creep into a society. Some of the horrible things that happened in the past, that just crept in and became all normalized, and people became numb to it. We can’t allow that to happen again.”
Asked what he thinks about Mark Zuckerberg’s role in the alleged discrimination, Carson said he hopes that Zuckerberg and other head honchos at Facebook are not doing it intentionally and that Facebook will make its operations transparent.
“Well, I hope he just really hasn’t thought deeply about what he’s doing, and they’re not the only ones, there are others too, and I hope they’re paying close attention to this,” Carson said. “We need to recognize that our people have rights, and you know, mining information about them that they’re unaware of, what websites they’re visiting, what apps they’re downloading, where they’re physically present, what things they are buying, and then using that kind of information along with protected class information to discriminate is just outrageous,” Carson added. The “others” Carson mentions include tech giants Twitter and Google.
“I’m hopeful that they just haven’t really thought it through, and that there are good people there, and that they will sit down and, working with our people and other advocates, come up with something that is very reasonable, that is very transparent, that if anybody heard would say it was fair,” he added. “That’s the way it should be done.”
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