Discrimination through optimization: How Facebook’s ad delivery can lead to skewed outcomes
The enormous financial success of online advertising platforms is partially due to the precise targeting features they offer. Although researchers and journalists have found many ways that advertisers can target – or exclude – particular groups of users seeing their ads, comparatively little attenti…
Ad-delivery is controlled by the advertising platform (eg. Facebook) and researchers have found evidence for particular ad delivery skewing along racial lines for housing ads and for jobs (job ads for janitors and taxi drivers were shown to a higher number of minorities compared to white users).
