If you were a black guy in the Bronx liking ****loads of anime pages on FB back in 2016, your Affinity would have been Asian-American and you would have been served ads by advertisers that they felt aligned with your cultural background. That's how they worked up until late 2016 when they were phased out.

I'm not saying it isn't possible to get pretty close to targeting race if you drilled down far enough into layering down interests, but it was never especially easy and the data was never some kind of ironclad guarantee that you'd reach that audience the way you wanted to. Which is why nobody said anything about it for nearly three years until after the 2016 election cycle.

Beotch I used those Affinities for ads back when they existed, including running ads that targeted lower income homeowners for refinancing. It was inaccurate as **** back in 2015. That's why nobody cared until Trump won and suddenly everyone who lost needed another scapegoat to tack onto their bullet point lists.

I've been in online advertising in some way or another for over a decade now. I'm explaining a subject I actually know a thing or two about and Frown is trying to lecture me.

Accurate or not it's still race targeting.

Mfw Anteater admits to a blatant ECOA violation that wasn't even ambigious in 2010, let alone 2016.

We noticed.

Rapper Lil Yachty arrested after driving over 150 mph on Atlanta highway, police say

There was nothing "ambigious" or illegal about it, you dope. Affinities were primarily used for A-B testing to determine if people responded better to messaging that incorporated some degree of diversity versus just showing a bunch of smiling white people in an office break room. What makes social media advertising interesting (and scary) is that it can tap into demographic interests over time in increasingly more intricate ways by seeing how people respond to fairly broad sets of material. In that sense, it works like a funnel.

You remember that Straight Outta Compton movie? A lot of positive buzz was made about how smart the people behind that movie were at using digital ads to get that movie in front of more people who were legitimately interested in "African-American culture" based on their behavior on the platform.

If you target your ads for a mortgage product by race in any manner it is expressly illegal under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. I mentioned that this was unambiguously illegal since that clarification on social media advertising in lending was done via enforcement years after it was put into effect. It still remains illegal even if you don't think that your race targeting is race targeting lol

You aren't wrong in regards to the ECOA...which is why I'm going to reiterate this one last time - you can't target people by race on Facebook. That's why we weren't all seeing headlines from 2008 through 2016 about hundreds of FB advertisers going to prison. You could try to target someone in that way, but any ad you serve isn't going to be seen by just one demographic even if you try to narrow it down. If I set up a personal account and filled out absolutely everything, upload all my pictures, whatever - there's nowhere you can actually fill out or check a box on your race. Facebook serves ads based on your behavior, interests and what users click on....which is why I never click on those things cause I don't want that algorithm to guess anything about me. Maybe other people just aren't that cautious.

So the checkboxes don't exist.

Then they exist but not like how people say.

Then they exist how people say but they don't work anyway so it doesn't matter.

Just stop lying dude.

p.s. the reason you didn't see the headlines that you're expecting is because fines and having a patsy's license to practice pulled wouldn't generate much engagement. That's all I have to say about mortgage compliance, I quit that toxic industry for a reason.

I'll tell you what. Let me know when you can follow a basic conversation and we will resume it. Otherwise, let's move on to a different topic. I've explained it as well as I can, and only then because you made a big deal about Affinities, which is something you wouldn't have led with if you knew how Facebook worked. I was humoring you, but I don't really have anything to add since I've covered both the Ad Manager and Personal profiles.