Addressing racial bias in the online economy

The online economy has not resolved the issue of race-based ad targeting. In Oct, in response to public outcry over a new feature enabling advertisers to deliberately exclude members of its “ethnic affinities” category from particular campaigns, Facebook stopped ethnicity-based, target marketing for certain ads, specifically housing, employment, and the extension of credit. Despite Facebook’s initial justification of its ability to “serve highly relevant content to affinity-based audiences,” an initial letter from four members of the Congressional Black Caucus, followed by a class-action lawsuit, found the practice to be in violation of federal nondiscrimination laws and symptomatic of Silicon Valley’s lack of workforce diversity.

The social media giant joins a host of other high tech companies that find themselves wedged between the values of permissionless innovation, which seeks to remove barriers to entry for technology experimentation, and the social responsibility to protected classes, particularly in sheltering racial and ethnic groups from either explicit discrimination, unconscious bias, or both.