Harris County’s clerk’s office changed the advertising settings on its online get-out-the-vote ads Thursday night, hours after the Texas Attorney General’s Office sued over targeting it described as racially discriminatory. The change came while the ads were still running on Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and the dispute now turns on whether removing the audience tags changes anything in court.
Teneshia Hudspeth said the tags were removed late Thursday to avoid unnecessary distractions from the election. That made the move both practical and urgent: the office wanted the ads to keep doing their job, but without the targeting fields that had drawn the lawsuit and put the county on the defensive.
The lawsuit asked a Harris County district judge to order the ads pulled or reconfigured and said they had been aimed at Black, Latino and Asian voters while excluding European ethnicities. It also argued that the online ads used audience tags that intentionally directed them toward users with African, Asian and Latino-related interests and backgrounds, including labels tied to African-American literature, Latin music, Hispanic kitchen and East Asia.
Those tags, the filing said, also included 27 different countries and several foreign cities, including Madrid and Bangkok. The ads themselves urged voters to make a plan to vote and had begun running in late September and early October. The state said that by using ad targeting that prioritizes people of certain ethnicities but not others, the clerk’s office acted unconstitutionally.
That is the part that leaves the case unsettled. Harris County says the audience tags are gone, but it is unclear whether that change undercuts the lawsuit, moots part of it or simply shifts the fight to what happened before Thursday night. The Texas Attorney General’s Office said every moment the ads remain active and improperly targeted means the defendants are violating the Texas Constitution, and that leaves the county facing a legal test even after the settings were changed.
