The Internet age has opened up whole new arenas for racism — as an African-American Harvard professor discovered when she stumbled upon a startling phenomenon involving the Google search engine: Black-sounding names are more often accompanied by ads asking about arrest records than white-sounding names.
Professor Latanya Sweeney discovered the phenomenon when she saw that a Google search of her own name elicited ads for a background check service that hinted she might have been arrested. This prompted her to embark on an investigation of how Google treats black- and white-sounding names differently.
After searching 2,184 “racially associated” first names, Sweeney found that Google was 25 percent more likely to return ads suggesting an arrest record with black-sounding names.
In her report, Sweeney described all the circumstances where this could hurt an individual, such as in competition for a job, a promotion, applying for a mortgage or renting an apartment, joining a social club or dating a potential new partner.
“Appearing alongside your list of accomplishments is an advertisement implying you may have a criminal record, whether you actually have one or not,” she writes in her report. “Worse, the ads don’t appear for your competitor.”
“Notice that racism can result, even if not intentional, and that online activity may be so ubiquitous and intimately entwined with technology design that technologists may now have to think about societal consequences like structural racism in the technology they design,” the rep.
A Google spokesman told The Huffington Post that the company does not target its users based on race and pointed out that advertisers are free to choose the terms against which their ads will appear.
“AdWords does not conduct any racial profiling,” the spokesman wrote in an email. “We also have an ‘anti’ and violence policy, which states that we will not allow ads that advocate against an organization, person or group of people. It is up to individual advertisers to decide which keywords they want to choose to trigger their ads.”
The Huffington Post also suggested the public may be to blame for clicking certain ads more frequently than others, prompting Google to respond by optimizing its customers’ ads in a way that more frequently displays ads that garner the most clicks.
