> they ought to be able to reason about the legal and social consequences of certain patterns of click-throughs I've worked with the people who optimize things

> they ought to be able to reason about the legal and social consequences of certain patterns of click-throughs I've worked with the people who optimize things like this (although they never thought of this particular one, probably a result of being Canadian) They can and do reason about the legal and social consequences. They don't give a shit as long as it makes money, and if there are legal consequences then they hide behind anonymous proxies and vps payed for with prepaid credit cards (hides them from google as well). Plenty of them make jokes about how shady and dishonest their business is and then go to church every weekend with their families and think nothing of it. If they were forced to they would justify things like this by pointing out that they are just optimizing keywords, if society is racist and the data algorithms detect that then so be it. Mostly they would just not care and continue to worry about a bad daily fluctuation wiping out a months profits or google catching on to the blackhat tactics they use sometimes and shutting their adwords accounts down. There is literally zero chance of convincing people doing ad network arbitrage to consider social consequences, and IANAL but the what are the legal consequences of using automated keyword optimization tools that would, by definition, reflect any biases of society at large?