A nonprofit advocacy group sued Meta this week, contending that the tech giant’s Facebook and Instagram platforms facilitate the targeting of ads for for-profit colleges to Black users, while disproportionately steering ads for public and non-profit colleges to white users.
The lawsuit, filed in the District of Columbia Superior Court on behalf of the non-profit Equal Rights Center (ERC), alleges that Meta thus “provides separate and unequal services to Black users in its places of public accommodations.”
In a statement, ERC’s lead lawyers, from the non-profit Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, call Meta’s practices “modern-day digital redlining.”
Redlining refers to unlawful practices that deny or restrict financial and other services — such as consumer loans and home mortgages — to people based on their race, ethnicity, or other protected characteristic.
ERC’s lawyers allege that Meta’s conduct violates the District of Columbia’s Human Rights Act and Consumer Protection Procedures Act.
As the lawyers note, many for-profit colleges have histories of using deceptive advertising and recruiting to draw people into high-priced, low-quality programs that leave many students worse off than when they enroll — deep in debt and without the careers they sought. As a result, ERC’s complaint argues, Black users are disadvantaged by Meta’s alleged practice of pushing them to for-profit schools and denying them communications from higher quality, more affordable schools.
For-profit schools with records of poor student outcomes have frequently been accused of targeting their marketing and recruiting at Black people.
The new complaint accuses Meta of promising to deliver users a “valuable and relevant personalized” ad experience when it has instead “[made] ad delivery decisions based on race.”
The complaint alleges that Meta collates data that Facebook and Instagram directly collect from users with data from various apps and websites, including, on at least one occasion, reported ethnicity information from the ACT college entrance exam website, and employs the collective data to target individual users.
The complaint references a July 2024 academic paper, describing how researchers submitted to Facebook pairs of ads, one for a for-profit college and the other for a nonprofit school. They found, according the complaint, that Black Facebook and Instagram users “were more likely to get ads for the for-profit colleges, while white Facebook and Instagram users were more likely to get the ads for the public nonprofit schools.” The complaint does not identify the academic study, but the description suggests the lawyers are referencing a report from researchers at Princeton and the University of South California.
A 2016 report by Pro Publica revealed that Facebook was permitting advertisers on its site to exclude users from their ad campaigns based on race. Facebook ultimately removed that option for advertisers, but further research suggests that Meta’s algorithms still effectively skew ads based on the race of the user.
Damon T. Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee, the legal group that filed the case, said in a statement, “Separate and unequal services should be remnants of the past, but they are still a present-day reality for Black users on Meta’s platforms.” He added, “Digital redlining, especially in today’s higher education market, sends the unmistakable signal that Black people belong in some institutions but not others. This lawsuit aims to make it clear that no corporation—not even a Big Tech company as powerful as Meta—should be allowed to profit from the discriminatory treatment of Black students and consumers.”
Meta has not responded to our request for comment on the lawsuit.
ERC is also represented in the case by the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, and the law firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP.
[Editor's note: This article originally appeared on Republic Report.]
