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On March 30 2018 00:04 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2018 23:52 hunts wrote:
I mean to play devils advocate here, it's not like they're denying housing to blacks, they're simply not advertising it to them. Is it really illegal to not advertise to certain demographics? It's probably not illegal currently, but that does not mean that it is not highly unethical. Especially if you view the situation from a civil rights background, the idea that only the people of a certain race ever get the offer to buy something sounds really bad. This wasn't a problem in the past, because you couldn't really advertise as targeted as today. If you hang out a billboard, everyone who passes by can see it. But in a social media world, people have their own realities. This is another situation where laws build for a different world don't work very well to deal with a changed situation. The answer to that is thus that the law needs to be changed in a way to deal with this problem and resolve this ethically, especially removing discrimination.
This really isnt that diffrent. You always could setup You billboards only in certain neighborhood. Mostly black or mostly white or whatever. Certain brands advertise in magazines or places only rich people read/visit. Advertisements were always targeted at some demographic. There is nothing inherntly bad in it.
There are bilboards in Poland with advertisements in Silesian. I cant understand them. Are those advertisment racist ?
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On March 30 2018 01:06 Azuzu wrote:Show nested quote +On March 30 2018 00:20 Plansix wrote:On March 30 2018 00:17 Simberto wrote:On March 30 2018 00:11 Plansix wrote:On March 30 2018 00:05 hunts wrote:
Would you say that there is similar logic in saying "a baker should be able to refuse baking s cake for a gay wedding for any reason" as "a landlord should be able to not advertise to certain demographics for any reason?" It is similar to baking issue, but more overt in its impact. This would be similar putting a sign up that said, “no gays”. Housing is a finite resource and dictates everything from services available to the family to political representation, so it directly impacts how people live and how represents them. Banking also has similar laws. That is why you see the phrase “Equal housing lender” in all banking ads. They don’t put that in there because it is a marketing tool. On March 30 2018 00:04 Simberto wrote:On March 29 2018 23:52 hunts wrote:
I mean to play devils advocate here, it's not like they're denying housing to blacks, they're simply not advertising it to them. Is it really illegal to not advertise to certain demographics? It's probably not illegal currently, but that does not mean that it is not highly unethical. It is 100% illegal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1968 Oh, thanks. So it is indeed illegal. The only legal question remaining is whether you only showing your ad to white people indicates a preference based on race. I bet some lawyers find a way to argue that it does not. "Advertising the sale or rental of a dwelling indicating preference of discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin (amended by Congress as part of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 to include sex[18] and, as of 1988, people with disabilities and families with children.)" That argument has been legally settled well before today. The answer is “yes”. Any attempt to target ads based on race, gender, religion, disabilities or having children is prohibited under the law. How is the responsibility between the poster and message board balanced? Are the people selecting these options breaking the law as well?
I believe that is the case, though I think facebook will be held responsible as they should know better and were told about this two years ago. Most of the cases my wife saw were landlords posting ads with phrases like “no kids” on places like craigslist. And the landlords did it without any real knowledge they were breaking the law, so they corrected the problem once they were told.
Facebook is to blame for giving people a check box that effectively says “Who would you like to discriminate against with these ads?” When people use services like Facebook, there is this implied understanding that Facebook isn’t offering ways to break the law in the form of a check box.
On March 30 2018 01:23 Silvanel wrote:Show nested quote +On March 30 2018 00:04 Simberto wrote:On March 29 2018 23:52 hunts wrote:
I mean to play devils advocate here, it's not like they're denying housing to blacks, they're simply not advertising it to them. Is it really illegal to not advertise to certain demographics? It's probably not illegal currently, but that does not mean that it is not highly unethical. Especially if you view the situation from a civil rights background, the idea that only the people of a certain race ever get the offer to buy something sounds really bad. This wasn't a problem in the past, because you couldn't really advertise as targeted as today. If you hang out a billboard, everyone who passes by can see it. But in a social media world, people have their own realities. This is another situation where laws build for a different world don't work very well to deal with a changed situation. The answer to that is thus that the law needs to be changed in a way to deal with this problem and resolve this ethically, especially removing discrimination. This really isnt that diffrent. You always could setup You billboards only in certain neighborhood. Mostly black or mostly white or whatever. Certain brands advertise in magazines or places only rich people read/visit. Advertisements were always targeted at some demographic. There is nothing inherntly bad in it. There are bilboards in Poland with advertisements in Silesian. I cant understand them. Are those advertisment racist ?
This issue is unique to the US and our long history with segregation and denying blacks the specific services. The billboard would not be a violation. A history of avoiding advertising in black communities and with substantive evidence that it was done with the intent to avoid renting to blacks would be a violation.
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Craigslist is definitely interesting in that they spell out very clearly a lot of things you should not say in your ads. Of course, knowing that it's unlikely they'll ever face any consequences, many ads do so anyway.
I understand the practicality of going after a large entity like Facebook, but I'm not entirely convinced that ignorance of the law is good enough cover for people posting discriminatory ads.
Edit: In a more broad sense, you could compare this to a company making a BitTorrent client. The company knows that their service will be used for illegal purposes, so should they as the company providing the service, be responsible for illegal user activity?
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It was breaking the law, it is just a matter of how wide spread the problem is. If you are dealing with a family that rents out one half of their two family home, a slap on the wrist normally takes care of the problem. If it is a property manager that handles a ton of rentals in a city, a lawsuit, fines and supervision after the case resolves is the course of action.
In the case of Facebook, I bet the discovery process in the lawsuits filed against them will result in further legal action against companies that should have known better.
Edit: Bittorrent is weird. I bet if we went through their emails we could find evidence that they build the software to be used for illegal purposes and to profit from that. But we would need those emails. But Facebook is different because they are entering into the advertising market that already has laws on teh books about what is illegal. Being on the internet doesn't change how the Fair Housing Act operates.
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On March 30 2018 02:25 Azuzu wrote:
Craigslist is definitely interesting in that they spell out very clearly a lot of things you should not say in your ads. Of course, knowing that it's unlikely they'll ever face any consequences, many ads do so anyway.
I understand the practicality of going after a large entity like Facebook, but I'm not entirely convinced that ignorance of the law is good enough cover for people posting discriminatory ads.
One of the problems with enforcing any of it is let's say someone takes out a discriminatory ad.
The most common is "no kids". It's one practically every newer property owner tries before they realize it's illegal.
So, someone has to report/catch it. Most publications check ads before placing them, this process flags most of them in most real estate publications (plus most of these are placed by people familiar with the industry and ad rules). Facebook changes that in a variety of ways, but primarily by providing specific data and letting you screen by it, but most importantly, by completely automating the process.
Thing is it shouldn't be hard to flag and fix something like this. It's not like they were going out of their way to fool the system. They basically told the system "we want to discriminate illegally" and the system responded with "excellent choice!".
So not only did they not correct the blatantly illegal use of their system, they didn't even touch anything that would be seen as exploiting a legal system.
It's the kind of thing that would give an aloof owner of a magazine version of this a heart attack, but facebook just shrugged it off like a question they didn't hear.
EDIT: as to the enforcing against the ignorant, illegally discriminating, property owner, all they have to do is change the ad and deny them without cause, then you have to prove a pattern, and if you do, your prize is usually a landlord that hates you and is looking for any possible way to screw you over.
SO the only people that can fix this without direct negative consequence don't really care because it doesn't effect them directly, and it indirectly benefits them if they have any latent resentments toward any of the communities targeted negatively.
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Facebook was made aware of this problem in 2016 and said they were going to address it. They have done nothing. Everything is a PR problem for them, not a legal problem. The only good side to the whole Facebook problem is it is giving us a perfect example of what lack of oversight and regulation can accomplish.
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So legally if someone decides to buy a billboard for their apartment rentals, do they have to also buy billboards in black neighborhoods, hispanic neighborhoods, child neighborhoods, etc..? Is it illegal to only be able to buy one billboard ad, and have it happen to be in a predominantly white area? If you happen to be able to afford comercials on say only 1 channel and it happens to be say the history channel or discovery channel and not BET, is that also illegal because you're not doing equal ads for blacks? What if these people were renting out specifically high end apartments and had statistical data to show that few enough blacks and hispanics could afford or would want to live there that targeting them in ads would be a loss of money? Are they required to advertise to demographics that are unlikely to buy their product at a loss just so they aren't discriminating?
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On March 30 2018 02:40 Plansix wrote:
Facebook was made aware of this problem in 2016 and said they were going to address it. They have done nothing. Everything is a PR problem for them, not a legal problem. The only good side to the whole Facebook problem is it is giving us a perfect example of what lack of oversight and regulation can accomplish.
The people arguing for it aren't wrong when they say the Democrats don't have any intentions of finding solutions either. They just want to see how they can exploit to their own advantage.
There's a variety of general application solutions that should be applied across a wide swath of industries, but they all own enough of congress to prevent anything effective from ever getting done. By the time congress passes something all of the special interest groups that opposed it have lobbied out exemptions and loopholes enough they often become it's biggest backers.
That's the problem with US politics today. Both sides are right about the other side supporting stupid policy but all they can do is go back to the stupid policy on their side rather than leave the sides and follow the good policy.
On March 30 2018 02:46 hunts wrote:
So legally if someone decides to buy a billboard for their apartment rentals, do they have to also buy billboards in black neighborhoods, hispanic neighborhoods, child neighborhoods, etc..? Is it illegal to only be able to buy one billboard ad, and have it happen to be in a predominantly white area? If you happen to be able to afford comercials on say only 1 channel and it happens to be say the history channel or discovery channel and not BET, is that also illegal because you're not doing equal ads for blacks? What if these people were renting out specifically high end apartments and had statistical data to show that few enough blacks and hispanics could afford or would want to live there that targeting them in ads would be a loss of money? Are they required to advertise to demographics that are unlikely to buy their product at a loss just so they aren't discriminating?
In spirit, sure most of them are breaking the law, in application, no no one would get sued for that. People barely get sued for putting the explicitly illegal phrases in public ads. Basically only when they want to fight that they should be able to ignore the law for xyz reasons.
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On March 30 2018 02:46 hunts wrote:
So legally if someone decides to buy a billboard for their apartment rentals, do they have to also buy billboards in black neighborhoods, hispanic neighborhoods, child neighborhoods, etc..? Is it illegal to only be able to buy one billboard ad, and have it happen to be in a predominantly white area? If you happen to be able to afford comercials on say only 1 channel and it happens to be say the history channel or discovery channel and not BET, is that also illegal because you're not doing equal ads for blacks? What if these people were renting out specifically high end apartments and had statistical data to show that few enough blacks and hispanics could afford or would want to live there that targeting them in ads would be a loss of money? Are they required to advertise to demographics that are unlikely to buy their product at a loss just so they aren't discriminating? Again, its not about "you must reach all racial groups equally".
Its about "You must not purposefully aim to avoid certain racial groups".
A billboard on the street does not purposefully aim to avoid a racial group, same for an ad on a channel
But when I send out a facebook ad for an apartment and exclude all neighborhoods with predominantly black residents I'm potentially in trouble.
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On March 30 2018 02:46 hunts wrote:
So legally if someone decides to buy a billboard for their apartment rentals, do they have to also buy billboards in black neighborhoods, hispanic neighborhoods, child neighborhoods, etc..? Is it illegal to only be able to buy one billboard ad, and have it happen to be in a predominantly white area? If you happen to be able to afford comercials on say only 1 channel and it happens to be say the history channel or discovery channel and not BET, is that also illegal because you're not doing equal ads for blacks? What if these people were renting out specifically high end apartments and had statistical data to show that few enough blacks and hispanics could afford or would want to live there that targeting them in ads would be a loss of money? Are they required to advertise to demographics that are unlikely to buy their product at a loss just so they aren't discriminating?
So legally if someone decides to buy a billboard for their apartment rentals, do they have to also buy billboards in black neighborhoods, hispanic neighborhoods, child neighborhoods, etc..?
They do not need to do this. Don't discriminate, but by billboards wherever. Also property management companies don't really use billboards from my experience.
Is it illegal to only be able to buy one billboard ad, and have it happen to be in a predominantly white area?
Don't do it like 10 times in a row and have no black tenants in area with 50% black population.
If you happen to be able to afford comercials on say only 1 channel and it happens to be say the history channel or discovery channel and not BET, is that also illegal because you're not doing equal ads for blacks?
It is fine to adevertise on channel 1. But if you wrote an email to the person bying the ads saying "don't advertise on BET because we don't want those people in our units", its a bad idea.
What if these people were renting out specifically high end apartments and had statistical data to show that few enough blacks and hispanics could afford or would want to live there that targeting them in ads would be a loss of money?
Likely a good idea to show that you accept rental applications from everyone and only deny based on income, credit checks or criminal records. Never because “It didn’t feel like a good match”.
Are they required to advertise to demographics that are unlikely to buy their product at a loss just so they aren't discriminating?
It is a terrible idea to tell an advertiser “don’t run ads in those black communities, they don’t want to live here anyways.” Don't do that.
Also, you continue to use the word “products” which normally refers to do with dish soap or Ipads. This is about real estate, which is a very different market that does not deal in consumer goods(that land is not consumed when it is rented out, and the product is finite)
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Canada11350 Posts
On March 29 2018 21:54 GreenHorizons wrote:I think you guys are inadvertently coming around to understanding why I say "abolish the police". As an organization (rather than a functional social role) the police are a bad entity. People that terrified and incapable of handling a situation like that simply shouldn't be given the ability to roam society armed with a gun, and a statistically unjustifiable freedom from accountability. Show nested quote +On March 29 2018 21:51 zlefin wrote:On March 29 2018 21:49 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
But the US military has a far higher threshold. As does the general "civilian" population for "exerting" lethal force. It is the US police force that is the anomaly. It appears to be distinctively an American policing problem than generally an American cultural problem. it's an american cultural problem in that the american people, via the jury trials of police officers, tend to be very lenient toward them when suhc occurs, whereas they are not similarly lenient toward civilians acting in that way. I imagine that if US military cases in this area were handled by civilian jury trials, they'd get off far lighter than they currently do. Pretty sure that's the point. Soldiers aren't trained to police, they are trained to kill. When a force dedicated to teaching people how to kill is more stringent internally and externally about killing people than an institution 'dedicated' to 'protecting and serving' US constitutionally protected civilians, it's not just a culture issue, but systemic and institutional one. The police as an institution must be systematically torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. Every aspect top to bottom has been corrupted to point in which their nominal function is barely even nominal any more.
Wouldn't the more direct solution be to try all police by judge rather than jury if a significant issue is juries are too lenient with police? I really don't want to get back into abolition again, but it would be like your solution to fixing gerrymandering would be 'just end democracy'. Well, sure. That might fix gerrymandering... and open up a host of new problems. How about we go from 0 to 60 and stay on the road, rather than 0 to 120 and intentionally careen off a cliff and hope something good happens?
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No one can be denied people their right to a trial by jury in a criminal manner that involves jail time. The key is to change the standards requested to justify the employing legal force.
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Canada11350 Posts
On March 30 2018 03:16 Plansix wrote:
No one can be denied people their right to a trial by jury in a criminal manner that involves jail time. The key is to change the standards requested to justify the employing legal force.
How locked in is this in the US though? Is it in the constitution? Because if so, that's never changing.
I'm wondering this partially because we've been having some hue and cry up here over our justice system because in two separate cases, white guys walked away not guilty, involving dead indigenous people. There's been a lot of talk on how Voir Dire in particular causes problems, particularly for our indigenous. I don't really think so, and I don't think our justice is bad as all that- reading the overviews of the two cases, I don't think it was bias at work. But it made me think if our "justice system is not for Indigenous people', where could we pivot to? And I could really only think trial by judge rather than by jury.
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The Sixth Amendment reads:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Gonna take an amendment to change jury requirements in criminal proceedings.
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On March 30 2018 03:37 farvacola wrote:The Sixth Amendment reads: Show nested quote +In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence. Gonna take an amendment to change jury requirements in criminal proceedings.
Dont be silly, ya'll dont amend amendments. Amendments are so sacred you cant amend them.
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Also I would caution people who place their faith in judges over juries. It is just a different flavor of the same problem.
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On March 30 2018 03:40 Rebs wrote:Show nested quote +On March 30 2018 03:37 farvacola wrote:The Sixth Amendment reads: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence. Gonna take an amendment to change jury requirements in criminal proceedings. Dont be silly, ya'll dont amend amendments. Amendments are so sacred you cant amend them.
And in the case of the Ninth, so sacred that our courts sometimes read them out of existence entirely 
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I don't mind this. He isn't actually a terrorist for sure, but I'm all for someone calling out the discrepancy in media. If he had brown skinn color he would have been labeled a "T" a long time ago by every news outlet in the world.
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I wonder how many people listened to this terrorists confession, I suspect there are some clues the good sheriff may have missed.
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EPT
