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Ad platforms such as Facebook, Google and LinkedIn promise value for advertisers through their targeted advertising. However, multiple studies have shown that ad delivery on such platforms can be skewed by gender or race due to hidden…
Political campaigns are increasingly turning to digital advertising to reach voters. These platforms empower advertisers to target messages to platform users with great precision, including through inferences about those users' political…
Targeted advertising platforms are widely used by job advertisers to reach potential employees; thus issues of discrimination due to targeting that have surfaced have received widespread attention. Advertisers could misuse targeting tools…
Online advertising platforms use algorithmic systems to power the process of matching ads to users, termed ad delivery. Prior audits have demonstrated that ad delivery can be skewed by demographic attributes, such that ads are…
Targeted advertising remains an important part of the free web browsing experience, where advertisers' targeting and personalization algorithms together find the most relevant audience for millions of ads every day. However, given the wide…
Fairness in online advertising is often formalized as a distributive justice problem, aiming to ensure that impressions, opportunities, or outcomes are allocated comparably across protected groups. Yet online advertising can still produce…
Communication strongly influences attitudes on climate change. Within sponsored communication, high spend and high reach advertising dominates. In the advertising ecosystem we can distinguish actors with adversarial stances: organizations…
Auditing social-media algorithms has become a focus of public-interest research and policymaking to ensure their fairness across demographic groups such as race, age, and gender in consequential domains such as the presentation of…
Digital platforms, including social networks, are major sources of economic information. Evidence suggests that digital platforms display different socioeconomic opportunities to demographic groups. Our work addresses this issue by…
Digital ads on social-media platforms play an important role in shaping access to economic opportunities. Our work proposes and implements a new third-party auditing method that can evaluate racial bias in the delivery of ads for education…
Ad targeting is getting more powerful with introduction of new tools, such as Custom Audiences, behavioral targeting, and Audience Insights. Although this is beneficial for businesses as it enables people to receive more relevant…
Online advertising on platforms such as Google or Facebook has become an indispensable outreach tool, including for applications where it is desirable to engage different demographics in an equitable fashion, such as hiring, housing, civic…
Many companies rely on advertising platforms such as Google, Facebook, or Instagram to recruit a large and diverse applicant pool for job openings. Prior works have shown that equitable bidding may not result in equitable outcomes due to…
Detailed targeting of advertisements has long been one of the core offerings of online platforms. Unfortunately, malicious advertisers have frequently abused such targeting features, with results that range from violating civil rights laws…
Many digital platforms offer advertisers experimentation tools like Meta's Lift and A/B tests to optimize their ad campaigns. Lift tests compare outcomes between users eligible to see ads versus users in a no-ad control group. In contrast,…
Online advertising platforms are thriving due to the customizable audiences they offer advertisers. However, recent studies show that advertisements can be discriminatory with respect to the gender or race of the audience that sees the ad,…
Facebook and other advertising platforms exploit users data for marketing purposes by allowing advertisers to select specific users and target them (the practice is being called micro-targeting). However, advertisers such as Cambridge…
Users' behavioral footprints online enable firms to discover behavior-based user segments (or, segments) and deliver segment specific messages to users. Following the discovery of segments, delivery of messages to users through preferred…
Interactions between bids to show ads online can lead to an advertiser's ad being shown to more men than women even when the advertiser does not target towards men. We design bidding strategies that advertisers can use to avoid such…
Targeted advertising is meant to improve the efficiency of matching advertisers to their customers. However, targeted advertising can also be abused by malicious advertisers to efficiently reach people susceptible to false stories, stoke…