Citizen Browser
Facebook Got Rid of Racial Ad Categories. Or Did It?
Our Citizen Browser project found an array of proxies through which advertisers can target Black Facebook users, among other demographics
Leon Yin
Investigative Data Journalist
Leon Yin translates story ideas into testable hypotheses—the cornerstone of our journalism. He builds bespoke datasets and uses interdisciplinary methods to report on technology. Leon left The Markup in July 2023.
His reporting of Google search’s self-referential results was cited in the opening remarks of a congressional hearing on tech giants and antitrust. In 2022, he won a Gerald Loeb Award for Personal Finance and Consumer Reporting with Adrianne Jeffries for their series, “Amazon’s Advantage.”
Before joining The Markup, he was a research scientist at NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, a research affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute, and a software engineer at NASA.
Citizen Browser
After Repeatedly Promising Not to, Facebook Keeps Recommending Political Groups to Its Users
The company announced the policy as a way to stop spreading divisive content
Citizen Browser
Facebook Said It Would Stop Recommending Anti-Vaccine Groups. It Didn’t
As COVID-19 surged, the social media company pointed users to all sorts of anti-vaccine and anti-mask groups
Citizen Browser
How Big Pharma Finds Sick Users on Facebook
We found drug ads targeted at users interested in everything from bourbon to therapy
Google the Giant
Citing Markup Investigation, Civil Rights Group Demands Racial Equity Audit at Google
Color of Change petition calls Google’s block on advertisers searching for social justice content “unacceptable”
Citizen Browser
Credit Card Ads Were Targeted by Age, Violating Facebook’s Anti-Discrimination Policy
Such ads, along with other age-targeted financial product ads, may violate civil rights laws, attorneys say
Google the Giant
Google Blocks Advertisers from Targeting Black Lives Matter YouTube Videos
“Black power” and “Black Lives Matter” can't be used to find videos for ads, but “White power” and “White lives matter” were just fine
Show Your WorkGoogle the Giant
How We Discovered Google’s Social Justice Blocklist for YouTube Ad Placements
Despite committing to dismantling systemic racism, YouTube blocks advertisers from using many racial justice and cultural identity terms to target videos for ads
Show Your WorkGoogle the Giant
How We Discovered Google’s Hate Blocklist for Ad Placements on YouTube
We got under the hood of Google Ads and found poorly executed limitations meant to hide hate YouTube videos and channels from advertisers
Google the Giant
Google Has a Secret Blocklist that Hides YouTube Hate Videos from Advertisers—But It’s Full of Holes
Many well-known White supremacist and White nationalist terms and slogans were not blocked
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