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Ariana Tobin

Ariana is the crowdsourcing and engagement team editor at ProPublica, where she works to cultivate communities to inform our coverage.

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Ariana is the crowdsourcing and engagement team editor at ProPublica, working on community-sourced investigations. She has focused on technology and problematic labor practices, from Facebook-fueled discriminatory ads, large-scale layoffs of older workers at IBM and misclassified customer service representatives in the gig economy. Her reporting has contributed to three consecutive Gerald Loeb awards, two Edward R. Murrow awards, a SABEW Best in Business award and a Barlett & Steele bronze award.

She previously worked as an engagement editor at The Guardian, as a digital producer for APM’s Marketplace, and as a podcast producer at WNYC. There, she helped launch the multi-platform Bored and Brilliant and Infomagical series, which analyzed information on nearly 30,000 participants’ smartphone habits and earned her an Online News Association MJ Bear Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in outlets including The New Republic, The New York Times, the St. Louis Beacon and Bustle. She studied on a Fulbright grant in Minsk, Belarus. She is currently lead trainer for the Balkans Investigative Reporting Network’s Engaged Citizens Reporting program.

Machine Bias

Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

Among the companies we found doing it: Amazon, Verizon, UPS and Facebook itself. “It’s blatantly unlawful,” said one employment law expert.

Machine Bias

These Are the Job Ads You Can’t See on Facebook If You’re Older

It is against the law to discriminate against workers older than 40 in hiring and recruitment. We found dozens of companies who bought Facebook ads aimed at recruiting workers within limited age ranges.

Why We Had to Buy Racist, Sexist, Xenophobic, Ableist, and Otherwise Awful Facebook Ads

We repeated our 2016 test to figure out whether Facebook was adequately policing itself. It wasn’t.

Machine Bias

Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race

After ProPublica revealed last year that Facebook advertisers could target housing ads to whites only, the company announced it had built a system to spot and reject discriminatory ads. We retested and found major omissions.

Machine Bias

Facebook Enabled Advertisers to Reach ‘Jew Haters’

After being contacted by ProPublica, Facebook removed several anti-Semitic ad categories and promised to improve monitoring.

Machine Bias

Have You Experienced Hate Speech on Facebook? We Want To Hear From You.

Help us investigate how Facebook’s censorship policies actually work.

Here Are the Financial Disclosures of Officials Trump Has Installed Across the Government

The financial disclosures come from White House staffers, President Trump’s Cabinet and hundreds of members of so-called beachhead teams that the administration has quietly hired at federal agencies.

You Helped Us Find Hires the White House Never Announced, Including a Koch Brothers Alum

Thanks to your help, we've found many previously unannounced Trump White House hires, including a longtime member of an anti-ACLU group and an ex-Washington Times columnist.

Help Us Find the Missing White House Financial Disclosures. We Need Names

One month ago, the White House said they would make about 180 of its staffers’ financial disclosures public. We’re asking for your help to find the missing forms.

The White House Still Hasn’t Released Most Staffers’ Financial Disclosures

A week ago, the White House began releasing the Trump administration’s financial disclosures. But many are still missing. Here’s what we know now.