I deleted my Facebook back in 2017 thanks to a ProPublica story. From my recollection, reporters tried to place an ad on Facebook for apartment rentals and exclude Black people from the ad targeting. The ad went through and it was live for like a day, then ProPublica pulled the ad and published the story. A Facebook spokesperson said something to the effect of, “the targeting options are generated by an algorithm so we didn’t realize you could exclude Black people from apartment ads, oops, we’ll fix it”.
So the same reporters tried again a year later, same ad, same targeting settings. It went through again. So I got rid of Facebook and lost contact with quite a few people from high school. Best decision I ever made!
I deleted my Facebook back in 2017 thanks to a ProPublica story. From my recollection, reporters tried to place an ad on Facebook for apartment rentals and exclude Black people from the ad targeting. The ad went through and it was live for like a day, then ProPublica pulled the ad and published the story. A Facebook spokesperson said something to the effect of, “the targeting options are generated by an algorithm so we didn’t realize you could exclude Black people from apartment ads, oops, we’ll fix it”.
So the same reporters tried again a year later, same ad, same targeting settings. It went through again. So I got rid of Facebook and lost contact with quite a few people from high school. Best decision I ever made!