The social media site has been caught targeting racists with ads. It needs to take a long, hard look at itself and ask how this is allowed to happen
Remember the early days of Facebook, in 2004? If you had it, you were in college, or maybe a recent graduate, still using your college email address. Facebook existed to help people like you look up the person you fancied in your history lecture. In those golden days, that person would be categorized in one of a handful of ways. Single. In a relationship. Married. The confounding ‘it’s complicated’. There was no box for them to tick to indicate that they were a raging antisemite.
But Facebook has changed, as has our culture. Which is the chicken and which the egg is unclear. A bit of quick and easy reporting by ProPublica this week found that it’s now possible for advertisers to pay the platform to target their content to people who indicated interest in such topics as “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews [sic],” or, “History of ‘why jews [sic] ruin the world”.
To test it, ProPublica paid for three ads to be targeted to these people: Facebook approved the ads promptly. When pressed, Facebook representatives pointed out that it wasn’t down to human error, not exactly: the people sharing antisemitic interested had been identified by an algorithm. It wasn’t anyone’s fault! Well, no one in particular. “We know we have more work to do,” they said.
ProPublica’s insight here is not an exposure of the existence of people who identify themselves as ‘Jew hater’. Like many people of Jewish ethnicity or faith, I’ve known about them firsthand since a man first called me ‘a fucking Jew’ in the street.
We all knew that antisemites (and other flavors of racists and other kinds of jerks) like to connect with each other on Facebook, but this is an insight in particular about how Facebook has allowed hate speech not just to propagate, but to bloom.
Since their inception, social networks have always provided opportunities for people living on the earth to connect with like-minded others, even when the things they have in common is hate. It would be ridiculous to suggest that Facebook should make rules against terrible people finding other jerks with whom to share their hatred. That would be censorship. But that’s not the same thing as limiting ways in which hatred can be leveraged for cold, hard cash.
This isn’t the first time ProPublica has caught Facebook ad targeting being racist: a year ago, they demonstrated that they could prevent ads for housing from being shown to people of color. It was old-fashioned Fred Trump-style housing discrimination updated for the digital age, and again Facebook apologized and worked on repairing the system.
Facebook needs to take a long, cool look at its business practices and ask how their mission statement – “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” – is served by allowing their product to be driven by algorithms that identify people that aim to destroy communities.
Algorithms aren’t racist. People are. Until we can trust the latter, Facebook needs to put less power in the hands of the former. Even if that means we have to wait a few more years before robots truly run the world.
Read more: www.theguardian.com
