Skip to content

Comment on Racism is Poisoning Online Ad Delivery, Says Harvard Professor

Comments

Skimming the paper, it doesn't look like she accounted for how common each name is overall. Assume instantcheckmate, which runs the "arrest" themed searches, uses a broader set of names than the competition, that runs generic "looking for foo?" ads. If the black-identifying names are less common than white-identifying ones, that would be enough to cause the correlation.

Do these scam sites even check public records? "The Cesspool of Online Ads is Poisoning Online Ad Delivery" might be a better title.

Someone's bought up keywords and created ads for them. This is not Google being racist but some advertiser trying to narrow in on a particular demographic that they think will be profitable.

Sadly, as the researcher purchased that information, I think it's working.

The advertiser claims they're using a generic name list and applying all their templates uniformly across the board.

They're professional liars, so take it with a grain of salt.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.