Facebook removed several antisemitic ad categories after ProPublica asked about them and "promised to improve monitoring."
Want to market Nazi memorabilia, or recruit marchers for a far-right rally? Facebook’s self-service ad-buying platform had the right audience for you.
Until this week, when we asked Facebook about it, the world’s largest social network 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.’”
Surely what Facebook means by "monitoring" is monitoring what Facebook exposes about itself, not what Facebook itself monitors.
ProPublica (having bought ads targeted at the antisemitic categories and verified their fulfillment) offers this tobesure about how it all works:
"In all likelihood, the ad categories that we spotted were automatically generated ... Facebook’s algorithm automatically transforms people’s declared interests into advertising categories."
It can't be racist, it's just a computer program!
British historian David Starkey was fired today from one appointment and resigned from several others after remarking that the existence of “so many damn Blacks” showed that slavery was not a form of genocide. Canterbury Christ Church University immediately gave him the sack, while Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge said it “accepted the resignation of historian […]
Twitter, JPMorgan, and other organizations have announced they will stop using racially-charged coding and hardware terms like master, slave, blacklist, whitelist, and others as part of a thorough review of best practices around value-neutral terminology in programming and technology.
Watch the b-roll in this Fox News clip and note who they show wearing masks.pic.twitter.com/f9Cr9xhkDS — Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) July 1, 2020 Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick is prominent among Republicans angry about people wearing face masks to prevent the transmission of coronavirus during the Covid-19 pandemic. He dislikes it almost as much as he […]
When revved-up kids used to dribble a basketball through the kitchen or practice their footwork with a soccer ball in front of the television, exasperated parents would often just send ‘em outside to play. But these days, sending kids out might not be the best course of action. Despite all the changes, many budding young […]
When you sit down to play a new AAA video game like The Last of Us 2, you probably assume it was created by gaming experts with insane levels of artistic and technical talent. And…you’d be right. Top developers are craftsmen of the highest order, pouring literally thousands of man-hours into creating the greatest gaming […]
Earlier this year, we learned that Python had finally accomplished a feat other programming languages had failed for decades, to surpass Java as the second most-used coding language in the world. For its versatility and ease of use alone, its ascent among programmers isn’t hugely surprising. Then when you factor in its key role in […]
