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Racism In Online Ad Targeting
An anonymous reader writes "Most of us are familiar with advertisements in online web searching, and by now we've grown accustomed to scrolling past the 'sponsored' results to get to the real responses to our query. And we know the ads are context-sensitive; for example, searching for our favorite Federation Starship will bring up ads for a similarly-named car-rental agency. But now a Harvard University professor has found a more disturbing trend in those contextual ads: racism. 'Sweeney says she has evidence that black identifying names are up to 25 per cent more likely to be served with an arrest-related ad. "There is discrimination in delivery of these ads," she concludes. Sweeney gathered this evidence by collecting over 2000 names that were suggestive of race. For example, first names such as Trevon, Lakisha and Darnell suggest the owner is black while names like Laurie, Brendan and Katie suggest the owner is white. She then entered these plus surnames into Google.com and Reuters.com and examined the ads they returned. Most names generated ads for public records. However, black-identifying names turned out to be much more likely than white-identifying names to generate ads that including the word "arrest" (60 per cent versus 48 per cent).'"
It's not racism if the ads were being generated purely on statistical models. It may be a sad reflection of the state of African-Americans, but unless you can show how people have manipulated the process for some reason, it's merely statistics.
One cannot escape that in the US, there are more black inmates than white or hispanic. The reason for their incarceration may be race related (eg the popular DWB: driving while black, crime that many innocent people are charged with), but the fact remains that yes, a higher percentage of black people in the US are in US jails with respect to white people.
Maybe we can take the time to find out why this is the case, and correct it, rather than pretend that using official stats is racist.
I don't suppose you would ever accept the answer being something along the lines of "because they are committing the majority of the crimes in the US"?
Nah..it couldn't possibly be that simple.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I'm not going to argue that it's impossible that black people actually commit more crimes than white people, but i'm curious what statistics you're citing and how that data was gathered.
Let's imagine some mythical town which is 50% white and 50% black and whose judicial system is entirely free from irrational racism. However they rationally note that last year statistics showed black people were more likely to commit crimes than white people. So the cops pull over more black people and send out more patrols to predominately black neighborhoods. That's the rational thing to do after all. And surprise surprise! More black people end up getting arrested. So the statistics next year show black people are more likely to commit crimes. However a closer look at the data shows that both blacks and whites were equally likely to end up getting arrested after getting pulled over, and patrols in white neighborhoods had the same average number of arrests as patrols in black neighborhoods. Without any intentional racism on anyone's part racism still exists in the system just because of people blindly following statistics.
I'm not saying we need to mandate equal incarceration rates. But everyone should be treated equally regardless of what statistics might say about the likelihood of "someone like them" having committed a crime. And if there is some statistical evidence that one group is committing more crime and/or ending up in jail more then we shouldn't be using that as a justification for treating the two groups differently, we should instead be taking a long hard and in-depth look at why the statistics are that way.
However we're still at the point where some groups are being punished disproportionately for the same crime on a nationwide basis.
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I don't supposed she checked out the names of all the folks arrested. She might find that there is evidence there that suggests Google is merely following the numbers.
Now, she could argue that law enforcement is discriminatory. But that would be even more support for Google's efforts being evidence based and not a result of bias. It doesn't matter if you were arrested because of what you did or because of your name or color. You still need to make bail and get a lawyer.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Blacks were poor in the 50s but had the same rate of incarceration as whites even though they faced much greater discrimination than today: http://spiritofcontradiction.eu/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/incarceration.jpg
The difference was that in the 50s the black family was as strong as white family (as measured by the number of children raised by single parents). Since the "sexual liberation" in the 60s the black family has basically disintegrated. The number of black kids raised by single matter went up from 20s% to >70%. White kids also started from around 20% but only went up to 35%. It corresponds very nicely with the difference in incarceration rates.
The different response to the breakup of traditional family values can be explained by the fact that white families had greater roots in those traditions that were harder to break. It is the poorest who are always most vulnerable to great social change.
Maybe centuries old traditions of religion and family life are not based on stupid superstitions as many people educated beyond the level of their intelligence seem to think these days, but on the experience of what works and what doesn't that evolved over many centuries?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Let's apply the "look at all the blacks in prison, it MUST be racism" logic another way:
What % of inmates are male? 90%? 95%?
CLEARLY, that's a result of sexism on the part of the arresting officers, judges, juries and the entire system are biased against men, because if they weren't, a majority of the prison population would be women, right?
Sounds stupid in that context doesn't it?
Ask yourself why.
-Styopa
"What's racist is the "black identifying names" in TFA. Now that's racist. What? Because I'm a Caucasoid I can't be named a "black" name? Dark skinned folk can't be named "white" names? Fuck that."
Again, not racist, just numbers, statistics. A person named "Lakisha" is far far more likely to be black than white. Why are people getting angry at numbers? Is an expert or heuristic system "racist" when it determines this to be the case?
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"