April 15, 2019
Across the Field

Discrimination's Digital Frontier

Aaron Rieke and Corrine Yu

Article

In The Atlantic, we argue that digital platforms — which deliver exponentially more ads than their newsprint predecessors — are making core civil-rights laws increasingly challenging to enforce.

Corrine and Aaron write: "Facebook must redouble its efforts to address all facets of potential discrimination in its ad system. As a part of that, the company should provide the public with far more detail about how its advertising system works, especially more information about the ads it runs, including aggregate demographic statistics about the groups that ultimately saw them. Facebook has taken some small steps in this direction, mostly limited to political ads and the commission of a civil-rights audit, but there is much more to do."

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