Targeting race in ads is nothing new, but the stakes are high

Facebook, after great criticism, said it will stop a controversial practice that allowed advertisers to exclude audiences by race from housing and employment ads it carried on the platform. The public outcry over this practice, once it became known, was intense. But such racism in advertising is nothing new, and it's just the tip of the iceberg of the power of social media, all of which are advertising sites in disguise, to divide and exclude.

As professors of media and information who, respectively, previously spent 15 years in corporate marketing and advertising and in information technology, we would like to provide greater context to these controversies based on our knowledge and research.

Let’s start with the company's "ethnic affinity" marketing product, the ability for Facebook advertising customers to exclude by race or ethnicity, which only came to light after ProPublica bought an advertisement offering housing and found it could exclude African American, Latinx and Asian Facebook users. Housing exclusion, including advertising, on the grounds of race or color, familial status or age, religion, national origin and disability is in violation of the Federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Fair Housing Act Amendments Act of 1988. In other words, it's illegal — even when done with a fancy digital interface and algorithmic sorting.

Algorithmic sorting based on ethnicity is also a problem because Facebook does not allow its users to ethnically identify themselves. How is Facebook making blunt judgements about ethnic affinity when users are not explicitly encouraged to declare those affinities in their own profiles? It is impossible to know, since algorithms used by social media corporations are black boxes: impossible to see inside and treated as trade secrets, even when they are used to create, sort and display information about and to us.

One way to improve things would therefore be to make the algorithms accessible, transparent and responsive to critique, given their immense power to determine what kind of information and advertising we see.

Sadly, Facebook’s ethnic profiling feature was not novel. Indeed, the history of advertising through mass media has a long trajectory of discrimination and exclusion. For as long as the advertising industry has operated to sell products to consumers, it has employed racist imagery, tactics and market segmentation (read: exclusion) in order to create profit for clients.

In fact, there were brands, particularly in the luxury and financial services categories, that purposely did not want ethnic consumers to be associated with their products, believing that it would cheapen or denigrate the value of their products in the marketplace with white consumers. This was primarily true for African Americans, both lampooned in racist imagery and marketing to sell products (think Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben, both of whom are still with us, among many other marketing campaigns of the 19th and 20th century that were significantly worse) while simultaneously directly targeted for exclusion as consumers.

Witness the dramatic, yet realistic, treatment of the topic in "Mad Men’s" Season 3 episode featuring the potential pitching of color TV sets to black consumers — and the client’s refusal to do so based on racist fears of potential negative impact to its brand in the form of turning off their white base.

The purposeful exclusion of ethnic consumers by Madison Avenue gave rise to the development of a highly specialized industry of African American, Hispanic/Latinx, women’s and eventually LGBTQ advertising agencies that were charged with remedying past consumer exclusions by developing content, messaging, and distribution channels for such markets on behalf of corporate brands.

A number of major agencies with an ethnic focus, such as Burrell Communications, Carol H. Williams Advertising, and UniWorld Group, came to prominence in response to the Madison Avenue-era of 1950s general market advertising, becoming important players in developing a new paradigm for creating deliberate inclusion of customers of color whose consumer needs and desires had been long ignored.

For Facebook to develop a strategy to help companies reach ethnic consumers who often are watching mass media that caters to their interests, concerns or tastes in curated online spaces is therefore not a grand departure from print and television-era ethnically-focused agencies created to target untapped customers.

To reach those consumers, companies place creative advertising around shows that will draw the interest of those consumers they want to reach. This is Facebook’s strategy as well: to place advertising in front of the audiences its customers want to reach.

This is where similarities with pre-digital practices largely end. While other ethnically-focused agencies came into existence expressly to broaden markets to communities previously excluded, Facebook’s technological, algorithmically-driven, decision-making tool allowed companies wishing to advertise to do just the opposite: to create and disseminate advertising that, once again, actively excludes communities of color from seeing ads.

Call it Mad Men 2.0: not only does this ability remove the importance of human sensibility to contextualize advertising, to make sense of whether it is attempting to include ethnic groups or make a targeted ad campaign successful in its reach, but it also may  be breaking the law in its affordance of easy access to “Whites-preferred” or “Whites-only” campaigns such as the one ProPublica placed.

In response to strong objections by members of Congress and civil rights leaders, as well as members of the public, to the ethnic affinity program, Erin Egan, VP of US Public Policy and Chief Privacy Officer posted on a Facebook blog Friday, "We will disable the use of ethnic affinity marketing for ads that we identify as offering housing, employment, or credit. There are many non-discriminatory uses of our ethnic affinity solution in these areas, but we have decided that we can best guard against discrimination by suspending these types of ads.”

The key here is this: Facebook, in its capacity as an online advertising company — its primary business model for revenue generation —  attempted to automate a nuanced, contextual practice with deeply problematic historical roots and contemporary implications, with seemingly little foresight or regard for the potentially disastrous, racist and even illegal outcomes it would foster.

Further, the implications of such exclusions extend far beyond TV brands or fast food campaigns in the age of social media: the ease of targeting, or excluding, whole swaths of people for advertising has particular resonance in the 2016 election year, when traditional media outlets have largely abandoned substantive political coverage and over half of Americans turn to Facebook and platforms like it as a source of news and information.

Facebook users should demand that the company rebuild its flawed tools and functionality that rewards rampant misinformation and discrimination. A start could be identifying its own knowledge and cultural gaps by integrating urban marketing professionals, researchers in information and communications studies, social activists and community members to avoid the rollout of such problematic tools in the first place. Reluctance to do so must be seen for what it is: a desire to profit off of discrimination disguised as technological progress. We must hold Facebook to greater transparency, higher account, including legislatively, if it is going to act as a public good for credible, vetted information when it itself is reluctant to do so.

Public policy makers, Facebook’s shareholders and, most importantly, its users, should be demanding more responsibility from a firm that has morphed from providing a fun platform for elite college students to interact to each other to a major source of news and communications worldwide. Alternatively, we could all leave Facebook now, and re-engage in political debate through education and debate.

Let’s see a 21st century that delivers us from racism and not one that further encodes it into the platforms upon which we all rely.

Safiya U. Noble, Ph.D. and Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D. are both assistant professors in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. USA TODAY sometimes publishes columns from guest contributors.