Facebook’s Race-Targeted Ads Aren’t as Racist As You Think

IN LATE OCTOBER ProPublica released a scathing investigation showing how Facebook allows digital advertisers to narrow their target audience based on ethnic affinities like “African-American” or “Hispanic.” The report suggested that Facebook may be in violation of federal civil rights statutes and drew parallels to Jim Crow Era “whites only” housing ads. Facebook’s privacy and public policy manager, Steve Satterfield, told ProPublica that these ethnic filters exist to allow advertisers to test how different advertisements perform with different sections of the population. While A/B testing is standard practice at large tech companies, his comment did not address whether it is appropriate to segment these tests by ethnicity. This type of story is increasingly common, as concern that automation in the spheres of hiring, housing, advertising, and even criminal sentencing can lead to discriminatory outcomes. ProPublica’s report isn’t Facebook’s first scandal about the company’s online algorithms encoding human biases (see the firing of human editors in the company’s “trending feature”), and it may not be its last. But there are also good reasons why this type of targeting might not always be racist, and could even be necessary to prevent discrimination.