Facebook’s advertising algorithm disproportionately targets Black users with ads for for-profit colleges, according to new paper by a team of university researchers.

Like all major social media platforms, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, does not disclose exactly how or why its billions of users see certain posts and not others, including ads. In order to put Facebook’s black-box advertising system to the test, academics from Princeton and the University of Southern California purchased Facebook ads and tracked their performance among real Facebook users, a method they say produced “evidence of racial discrimination in Meta’s algorithmic delivery of ads for education opportunities, posing legal and ethical concerns.”

The researchers say they focused on for-profit colleges because of their long, demonstrable history of deceiving prospective students — particularly students of color — with predatory marketing while delivering lackluster educational outcomes and diminished job prospects compared to other colleges.

In a series of test marketing campaigns, the researchers purchased sets of two ads paired together: one for a public institution, like Colorado State University, and another marketing a for-profit company, like Strayer University. (Neither the for-profit colleges nor state schools advertised by the researchers were involved in the project).

Advertisers on Facebook can fine-tune their campaigns with a variety of targeting options, but race is no longer one of them. So the researchers found a clever proxy. Using North Carolina voter registration data that includes individuals’ races, the researchers built a sample audience that was 50 percent white and 50 percent Black. The Black users came from one region in North Carolina and white voters from another. Using Facebook’s “custom audiences” feature, they uploaded this roster of specific individuals to target with ads. Though Facebook’s ad........

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