Facebook has quietly removed “multicultural affinity” ad targeting option that allowed targeting by race, after years of charges of illegal discrimination
meaning moderators typically couldn't see a user's race, but its advertising algo could. https://www.getrevue.co/... @themarkup : This month, Facebook finally removed the “multicultural affinity” targeting category after we discovered the company was again allowing racial profiling in a job ad on its platform. More on what @jeremybmerrill found, and Facebook's response: https://www.getrevue.co/... Julia Angwin / @juliaangwin : I went on vacation and came back to find that Facebook had quietly ended racial ad profiling. It's a big change. Over the years, Facebook's racial ad targeting has been repeatedly found to enable illegal discrimination. https://www.getrevue.co/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a loop that opened with ProPublica's 2016 reporting on ethnic affinity targeting, which flagged how Facebook's ad system inferred users' races even though moderators couldn't see them. Facebook's first response was narrow: a pledge to bar ethnic affinity marketing from housing, employment, and credit ads.
The narrow fix didn't hold — a year later housing ads excluding demographics were still being approved, and Facebook only temporarily paused group exclusions while it studied advertiser behavior. What changed this month is scope: after The Markup caught a job ad again using racial profiling, Facebook removed the multicultural affinity category outright rather than patching categories one at a time.
First-order effects
- Advertisers lose access to race-based targeting everywhere on Facebook — not just in housing, employment, and credit — eliminating a segment many had used for reach optimization or culturally tailored creative.
Second-order effects
- Other platforms running inferred-demographic audience segments face the same playbook: a journalist documents a discriminatory ad, and the segment becomes indefensible to keep, forcing preemptive audits of lookalike categories.
Third-order effects
- The pattern across 2016–2020 shows change arriving through investigative exposure rather than regulator mandate, which points toward ad platforms treating protected-category inference as a compliance liability by default — and raises the question of whether regulators will formalize what Facebook has now conceded piecemeal.
The trend: Ad platforms are dismantling inferred-demographic targeting category by category under sustained press scrutiny, moving from narrow vertical bans toward wholesale removal of race-based segments.