STUFF (IS SOMETHING) WHITE PEOPLE LIKE: ON THE WHITE PROTOTYPICALITY OF FACEBOOK

Abstract

This project examines the life and death of Facebook’s “ethnic affinity” targeted advertising category. The category was the subject of several lawsuits that alleged it violated the Fair Housing Act, by allowing advertisers to exclude protected classes from the audience of an advertisement. It argues that the category serves to negotiate tensions between the supposedly “post-racial” aesthetic of web platforms, and the political economy of targeted advertising online. Using media genealogy as a method, it traces the introduction, transformation and eventual removal of “ethnic affinity” from Facebook’s interface. It reads across several archives that span a variety of stakeholders in the production and circulation of “ethnic affinity” in order to reconstruct how the category is understood, both as a technical object and as a discursive formation. It argues that technical discourse obscures the persistence of racial discrimination in algorithmic targeting by highlighting disparities between Facebook’s instructions to developers, its public-facing statements, and how advertisers understood its technical changes. “Ethnic affinity” is then best understood as a racial technology, one that constructs and enforces the boundaries of race. I argue that this has historical antecedents in the deployment of colorblindness as justification for racial disparity. This project contributes to studies on the relationship between technologies of racialization and platform capitalism.