Julia Angwin is a senior reporter at ProPublica. From 2000 to 2013, she was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where she led a privacy investigative team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting in 2011 and won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2010. Her book "Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance," was published by Times Books in 2014, and was shortlisted for Best Business Book of the Year by the Financial Times.
Also in 2014, Julia was named reporter of the year by the Newswomenâs Club of New York. In 2003, she was on a team of reporters at The Wall Street Journal that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for coverage of corporate corruption. She is also the author of âStealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in Americaâ (Random House, March 2009). She earned a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Chicago and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University.
For years, Congress and federal regulators have allowed the world’s largest social network to police itself — with disastrous results. Here are four promising reforms under discussion in Washington.
Our analysis shows that Facebook’s content reviewers often make different calls on whether to allow or delete items with similar content. See the inconsistencies.
We asked Facebook about its handling of 49 posts that might be deemed offensive. The company acknowledged that its content reviewers had made the wrong call on 22 of them.
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.
ProPublica built software and a machine-learning algorithm to allow Facebook users to send us the political ads that appear on their Facebook news feeds.
These ads raise doubts about Facebook’s ability to monitor paid political messages. In each case, the ads ran afoul of Facebook’s own guidelines to curb misleading and malicious advertising.
To make American campaigns more transparent, we’ve built a tool to display political ads that are rarely seen outside their selected audience of Facebook users.
The social network’s actions come after a ProPublica investigation revealed that Facebook failed to keep its promise to reject discriminatory housing ads.
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.
During the German parliamentary elections in September, many Germans used ProPublica's Political Ad Collector to identify political advertising in their Facebook news feeds. This database provides a rare window into political ads on Facebook, which are not normally seen by the general public.
The state changed its approach in response to ProPublica’s finding that minority neighborhoods were paying higher premiums than white areas with the same risk.
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