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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Yes, her reality is that she is no longer the person whom the ads continue to target her as. She claims that the level of misperception she's seeing from her ads is higher than normal, and provides examples of such. She's not claiming that non-transgendered persons never see mistargeted ads.

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How does she know what is "normal"? That was my point - nobody is "rejecting her reality". There are simply some ads that don't appeal to her, as happens to everybody else, too.

How can she blame the algorithms for rejecting her, if her past actually contains things that the algorithm happens to pick up on?

Since everybody gets ads that don't appeal to them, clearly it is just a case of algorithms not being smart enough. It's like saying the sky rejects her because it isn't pink. It is blue for technical reasons, not to spite her identity.

There is no malice on part of the algorithms, but I'm sure you can see how it would appear that way and make someone feel bad. Even people unintentionally hurt others feelings all the time, but their not having malice does not invalidate the way they made the other feel.

Would you say the same about the situation in the linked article?

"It would appear that way" - that was my whole point, that the perception is presumably wrong here. There is no rejection, and nobody built anti-trans parameters into their ad server by intent. Sure, the OP feels that way - but feelings can be changed, in theory. They should be amendable by rational thought. Also I suspect it can become a habit to frame everything in terms of "rejection of my identity". I am not blaming that person, just pointing out that it may not be a healthy habit.

Maybe, to sum it up in a more friendly way, this quote is a good summary: "never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence" (don't know who said it).

As for the miscarriage, I likewise wouldn't blame the algorithms or companies. However, I would think that most of them would be happy to learn and improve their algorithms. So pointing out such a flaw should hopefully be received well.

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