Targeted advertising systems automatically generated antisemitic ad categories

Evidence

That radical indifference produces equivalence without equality also affects the high science of targeted advertising. For example, journalist Julia Angwin and her colleagues at ProPublica discovered that Facebook “enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of ‘Jew hater,’ ‘How to burn jews,’ or ‘History of why jews ruin the world.’” As the journalists explained, “Facebook has long taken a hands-off approach to its advertising business.… Facebook generates its ad categories automatically based both on what users explicitly share with Facebook and what they implicitly convey through their online activity.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1617

Categorization

• SHARE: For anyone working in ad tech or platform policy: the concrete ProPublica evidence that ad categories mirror behavioral surplus-derived interests without moral filtering.
• XREF: connects to: Automated recommendation systems reproduce and intensify offline racial discrimination. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 36; The Internet’s global scale amplifies antisemitic conspiracy discourse; Trolls attack based on trigger words without reading the content — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice: How to Communicate…, 302

Broader Connections

• Automated recommendation systems reproduce and intensify offline racial discrimination. #expands (0.85) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 36
• The Internet’s global scale amplifies antisemitic conspiracy discourse #expands (0.80)
• Trolls attack based on trigger words without reading the content #corroborates (0.75) — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 302