From the ACLU, this is at Liberty.

I'm Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney here at the ACLU and your host.

Facebook has come under a lot of scrutiny recently for its treatment of political ads, its privacy policies, and even its logo.

But one development that's gotten less attention is its new portal for advertisers.

Now, advertisers for housing, employment, and credit no longer have the option to target their ads at certain

demographic groups in a discriminatory way. That change came about because of a landmark

settlement Facebook reached earlier this year with civil rights groups, including the ACLU,

on behalf of clients who were excluded from seeing certain job ads because of their gender and

age.

Today, we're replaying an interview from earlier this year with two ACLU lawyers involved

in securing major changes to Facebook's ad targeting.

Since we recorded the interview, the settlement has gone into effect.

They'll be watching closely to make sure Facebook lives up to its commitments.

A few weeks ago, the ACLU and a number of other civil rights organizations

announced a landmark settlement with Facebook, resolving a case about companies using ad-targeting filters on Facebook

to only show certain job postings, to be a police officer, for example,

to men. Pursuant to the settlement, Facebook has removed gender, race, and age filtering options

from ads dealing with housing, employment, and credit. This is good news, but it's only the tip of

the iceberg when it comes to artificial intelligence and the use of algorithms to reinforce and automatize bias.

So what is the impact on our daily lives when private companies and even governments delegate

policy and enforcement decisions to lines of computer code that are almost never subject

to public scrutiny?

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