15 years ago, there was a big racial divide in internet access. Since then, use of the web increased dramatically, and this gap has diminished. However, as Sharad Goel, Jake Hofman and I show in our paper, substantial inequalities still persist across demographic groups. When I was working at Yahoo! with Duncan Watts, we started investigating Nielsen data on the browsing history of quarter million individuals, predicting user demographics from their history and categorizing differences in online experience. This Messy Matters article explains some of our findings.
