Facebook Shows Users Different Things Based on Their Ethnicity

Ethnic Affinity is what Facebook is using in order to assign Facebook users into different groups based on their location, language, and interests. The four groups consist of non-multicultural, African-American, Asian-American or U.S. Hispanic people. People believe that this is racial profiling and discrimination because it is not like an advertisement which targets certain people.

An example of how Facebook is grouping people is when the movie Straight Out of Compton came out and they showed different trailers to different people.

"One trailer focused more on the rise of Dr. Dre  and Ice Cube (now a major movie star), without mentioning N.W.A. This trailer was shown to the non-multicultural group, AKA mostly white people, because they were assumed not to know much about the '80s group. Another trailer focused on N.W.A. itself and was shown to the African-American affinity group because that group was assumed to know more about N.W.A. A third, shorter trailer that included quotes in Spanish was targeted toward the U.S. Hispanic group," said Noelle Devoe, author of the article.

Universal marketing chief Doug Neil and Jim Underwood, Facebook's head of entertainment, discussed the partnership at an SXSW panel in Austin and described how using race-specific marketing really helped the movies success.

One Twitter user by the name David Carrol said "In advertising they call it targeting. Everywhere else we call it discrimination. No, Facebook. “Ethnic affinity” is also just discrimination in any other context"

Facebook did take action to respond back. One Facebook representative said "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."

Source: http://www.seventeen.com/life/tech-social-media/news/a39179/facebook-shows-users-with-different-ethnicities-different-things-on-their-timeline/ 

Facebook source: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/facebook-explains-that-it-is-totally-not-doing-racial-profiling/