Could Facebook Have Caught Its ’Jew Hater’ Ad Targeting? - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/539964
Facebook lives and dies by its algorithms. They decide the order of posts in your News Feed, the ads you see when you open the app, and which which news topics are trending. Algorithms make its vast platform possible, and Facebook can often seem to trust them completely—or at least thoughtlessly.
ProPublica does not argue that Facebook actually set up an anti-Semitic demographic that can be targeted by advertising. Rather, it suggests that algorithms—which developed the list of targetable demographics—saw enough people self-describing as “Jew hater” to lump them into a single group.
“Facebook does not know what its own algorithm is doing,” said Susan Benesch, a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and the director of the Dangerous Speech Project. “It is not the case that somebody at Facebook is sitting in a dark room cackling, and said, ‘Let’s encourage people to sell Nazi ads to Nazi sympathizers.’”
She continued: “In some ways, that would be much easier to correct, because there would be some intention, some bad person doing this on purpose somewhere. The algorithm doesn’t have a bad intention.”
Indeed, Facebook might not be alone in permitting unscrupulous ads to get through. The journalist Josh Benton demonstrated on Thursday that many of the same anti-Semitic keywords used by Facebook can also be used to buy ads on Google.