Author: Charlton McIlwain (New York University) 

The algorithmic systems and platforms that facilitate race-based targeted advertising and mark are the focal point of increased scrutiny by civil rights activists, advocacy organizations, policymakers, technologists, and others. Consensus is growing that these automated, algorithmic systems discriminate against and produce tangible harms that disproportionately impact communities and people of color. However, we collectively know less about the demonstrable ways that racial discrimination takes place in our contemporary digital advertising ecosystem. Further, we have fewer ways to think about how to conceptualize and document the potential impacts and harms of race-based advertising in both legacy media forms and especially in today’s digital media landscape, which is driven by search engines, digital advertising and marketing platforms, and a complex infrastructure of advertising and data technologies that create the systems and structures defining the business of advertising and marketing today.

This report and the research that produced it aims to accomplish the following:

1. Illuminate how marketers and advertisers target individuals and communities based on race in today’s digital advertising systems.

2. Identify policy challenges and interventions to help mitigate the impact of algorithmic discrimination in advertising and marketing practice.

3. Provide an alternative way of conceptualizing, measuring, and documenting the potential impacts and/or harms produced by race-based target marketing and advertising structured by digital marketing and advertising platforms.

4. Help the research and policy community think about what types of data can be marshaled to better understand the ways that racial targeting works in today’s digital advertising landscape and to help formulate methods for utilizing data to shape our understanding about how this industry practice produces discriminatory impacts and harms.

5. Provide grounding for all of the above in the systemic, structural, and historical context at the intersection of critical race theory, technological development, and advertising practice.