From The Hill
Trump officials challenge tech over housing discrimination
By Emily Birnbaum
The Trump administration is stepping up its scrutiny into whether Silicon Valley giants are enabling housing discrimination online.
The administration has already brought charges against Facebook and is investigating both Twitter and Google.
The moves mark a significant escalation in regulators’ efforts to apply federal civil rights law to online advertising and is creating a surprising alliance between watchdog groups and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. Experts say that if regulators step up enforcement, companies could be forced to significantly overhaul their lucrative ad-targeting strategies...
Deirdre Mulligan, a professor at University of California, Berkeley who has researched ad discrimination, told The Hill that HUD is raising questions about whether these companies “have a responsibility to think through the ways in which their algorithms on their own might lead to biases in who receives ads...”
Deirdre K. Mulligan is an Associate Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, a faculty Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, and an affiliated faculty of the Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity.
