Facebook explains that it is totally not doing racial profiling

It just wants to assign you an “ethnic affinity” based on what you do and like.

Annalee Newitz – Mar 21, 2016 5:20 pm | 110

Cookie Lyon is not impressed. Credit: FOX

On Friday, we reported that Facebook has a marketing tool that targets groups based on what the company believes your race is after assessing your activity. Today, Facebook reps explained to Ars how this targeting works—and why it isn’t really about race or ethnicity. Instead, they say it’s about ethnic activities and interests.

It sounds confusing because Facebook is trying to do two contradictory things. The company wants to offer advertisers access to multicultural communities, but it also wants to claim that it isn’t identifying users by their races. So how exactly do you become part of an “ethnic affinity” target group without being targeted as an ethnicity? Reps say Facebook never looks at census data, names, photos, or private information. Instead, they focus on what language you speak, where you’re from, and what interests you declare. Let’s say you are a fan of BET and have shown an interest in #BlackLivesMatter—well, then, you might be categorized as part of an African-American ethnic affinity.

That doesn’t mean that Facebook has identified you as a black person, Facebook reps hasten to say. It just means that you seem like you would be interested in black culture or activities. “They like African-American content,” one rep told Ars. “But we cannot and do not say to advertisers that they are ethnically black. Facebook does not have a way for people to self-identify by race or ethnicity on the platform.”

Whatever Facebook is calling these groups, however, the company has had to sit down and make lists of items that will be used to signal the ethnic affinities of Asian-Americans, African-Americans, and Hispanics (the three multicultural groups that advertisers can currently target). They may not be assembling lists of who is an Asian-American and who isn’t, but they are cobbling together ethnic stereotypes and deciding which of its users fit into them.

Facebook’s vision of ethnic identity

But Facebook insists—correctly—that the process is a lot more complicated and nuanced than that. The company actually has a fairly sophisticated notion of ethnic identity: they would not market something like the NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton to everyone Facebook has identified as part of the African-American affinity group. Instead, they would look for people who also like rap music or who have shown an interest in NWA. The company is very aware that just because someone is African-American does not necessarily mean they will like rap. Likewise, just because someone is Asian American doesn’t mean they like anime or Master of None.

In academic terms, Facebook is describing the difference between “essentialist identity” and “performative identity.” An essentialist approach to target marketing would assume that anyone who is African-American will have certain core traits that are shared among all African-Americans. The performative approach suggests that people are a collection of actions and that what you do every day says more about who you are than whether you have dark skin or were born in Taiwan. Facebook is marketing to the way you perform your identity on its social network, not the box you check on the census under “race.”

Facebook is describing the difference between “essentialist” and “performative” identity.

So why are Facebook users so anxious about this form of advertising? After all, target marketing based on ethnicity has been around for decades. Every time you watch BET or read Essence magazine, you get ads targeted at African-Americans. When you watch Univision, you get ads that are targeted at Hispanics.

Even though target marketing based on ethnicity is nothing new, it has always been opt-in before. But those going on Facebook are just behaving like members of the general population. Even when a Facebook user says they like #BlackLivesMatter, they don’t feel like asking to opt in to an ethnic identity—it’s just one of many interests that define that person. For marketers at Facebook, that’s the point. They want to monetize every aspect of your identity, whether that’s an ethnic affiliation or a preference for bean thread noodles.

The problem is that profiling somebody’s ethnic affinities has a lot more cultural baggage attached to it—to say the least—than profiling somebody’s taste in restaurants. And that’s why Facebook’s multicultural targeting scheme is getting a lot more pushback than the company bargained for.