15 June 2024

A Feature, Not a Bug

One of the features of the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ is that they allow advertisers to discriminate on the basis of protected class because of the enormous amount of data that they collect.

They have been caught doing this time and time again, the latest case being serving advertisements for more expensive colleges to Black and Latino users:

Meta's algorithms for presenting educational ads show signs of racial bias, according to researchers from Princeton University and the University of Southern California.

This finding is described in a paper titled "Auditing for Racial Discrimination in the Delivery of Education Ads," by Basileal Imana, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University; Aleksandra Korolova, assistant professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University; and John Heidemann, research professor of computer science at University of Southern California.

The paper, provided to The Register, is scheduled to be presented this week at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

"We find that Meta’s algorithms steer ads to for-profit universities and universities with historically predatory marketing practices to relatively more Black users than the ads for public universities," Korolova told The Register.

"Our work thus demonstrates yet another domain for which Meta shapes access to important life opportunities in a racially biased manner, and shows concerns of discrimination extend beyond the current scope of solutions, which have been limited to housing, employment and credit."

Meta, when it was known as Facebook, was sued in 2017 by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) following a 2016 report by non-profit ProPublica about how the internet goliath's ad platform allowed housing advertisers to avoid showing ads to people of a particular race. The US Fair Housing Act prohibits housing discrimination based on race, among other characteristics.

As I have noted, much of internet commerce, whether it be Facebook, Uber, or Airbnb seems to have a sales pitch that implies, "You won't have to serve black people," as part of their marketing.

This sh%$ needs to stop.

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