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Facebook Ad Platform Could Be Inherently Discriminatory, Researchers Say (theregister.co.uk)
Researchers from Northeastern Unviersity, the University of Southern Carolina, and tech accountability non-profit Upturn have released a paper that says Facebook's ad delivery system itself can steer ads intended to be inclusive toward discrimination without explicit intent. "In a paper titled, 'Discrimination through optimization: How Facebook's ad delivery can lead to skewed outcomes,' co-authors Muhammad Ali, Piotr Sapiezynski, Miranda Bogen, Aleksandra Korolova, Alan Mislove, and Aaron Rieke find that advertiser budgets and ad content affect ad delivery, skewing it along gender and racial lines even when neutral ad targeting settings are used," reports The Register. From the report: The researchers found that Facebook ads tend to be shown to men because women tend to click on ads more often, making them more expensive to reach through Facebook's system. That divide becomes apparent when ad budgets are compared, because the ad budget affects ad distribution. As the paper explains, "the higher the daily budget, the smaller the fraction of men in the audience." Such segregation may be appropriate and desirable for certain types of marketing pitches, but when applied to credit, employment and housing ads, the consequences can be problematic.
Ad content -- text and images -- also has a strong effect on whether ads get shown to men or women, even when the bidding strategy is the same and gender-agnostic targeting is used. In particular, the researchers found images had a surprisingly large effect on ad delivery. Ad URL destination has some effect -- an ad pointing to a bodybuilding site and an ad pointing to a cosmetics site had a baseline delivery distribution of 48 percent men and 40 percent men respectively. The addition of a title and headline doesn't change that much. But once the researchers added an image to the ad, the distribution pattern changed, with the bodybuilding site ad reaching an audience that was 75 percent male and the cosmetics ad reaching an audience that was 90 percent female. According to the researchers, their tests suggest, "Facebook has an automated image classification mechanism in place that is used to steer different ads towards different subsets of the user population." "In terms of credit, employment and housing ads, the problem with this system is that it discriminates where it shouldn't: Five ads for lumber industry jobs were delivered to an audience that was more than 90 percent men and more than 70 percent white; five ads for janitorial work were delivered to an audience that was more than 65 percent women and 75 percent black," the report adds. "Housing ads also showed a racial skew."
The latest findings come after years of criticism of Facebook's ad system. Last month, Facebook announced changes to the platform intended to prevent advertisers from deploying unfair credit, employment and housing ads. One week later, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sued Facebook for violating the Fair Housing Act.
Ad content -- text and images -- also has a strong effect on whether ads get shown to men or women, even when the bidding strategy is the same and gender-agnostic targeting is used. In particular, the researchers found images had a surprisingly large effect on ad delivery. Ad URL destination has some effect -- an ad pointing to a bodybuilding site and an ad pointing to a cosmetics site had a baseline delivery distribution of 48 percent men and 40 percent men respectively. The addition of a title and headline doesn't change that much. But once the researchers added an image to the ad, the distribution pattern changed, with the bodybuilding site ad reaching an audience that was 75 percent male and the cosmetics ad reaching an audience that was 90 percent female. According to the researchers, their tests suggest, "Facebook has an automated image classification mechanism in place that is used to steer different ads towards different subsets of the user population." "In terms of credit, employment and housing ads, the problem with this system is that it discriminates where it shouldn't: Five ads for lumber industry jobs were delivered to an audience that was more than 90 percent men and more than 70 percent white; five ads for janitorial work were delivered to an audience that was more than 65 percent women and 75 percent black," the report adds. "Housing ads also showed a racial skew."
The latest findings come after years of criticism of Facebook's ad system. Last month, Facebook announced changes to the platform intended to prevent advertisers from deploying unfair credit, employment and housing ads. One week later, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sued Facebook for violating the Fair Housing Act.
"ads tend to be shown to men because women tend to click on ads more often, making them more expensive to reach through Facebook's system." - wait, what? Each time they click one they're being "reached"...
Targeting certain ads toward certain people targets (ie discriminates between) different people? Wow who knew.
I demand that the ads I do not see be non-discriminatory!
Beaux gators you fucking retard
I suck lots of cocks and balls at the truck stop and everyone calls me gay, she really I just have the best HOSTing in town
apk
We'll be better off when we stop pretending that everything ought to be equal.
Even better, dismantle facebook and scatter its parts to the four corners of the Earth.
LOL. Who are they kidding? Negroes don't like going into the woods. The woods belong to the White Man.
It's always been this way. Why do you think network ratings are based on age demographics? Companies spend more money to target younger audiences because guess what! Younger audiences watch less TV. It's to get ads in front of them so companies spend more money putting ads on shows that tend to attract younger audiences*. Older audiences watch more of it. At a certain point, they watch so much it's cheap and easy to reach their eyeballs.
Certain brands target certain ages, sexes, incomes, even races. Just because "the internet!" doesn't suddenly make this a new.
*Yes, yes, I know. No one under 50 watches network TV anymore, but this is how it has always worked and that's the point: it's not some new problem brought on by the face books.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
There is no University of Southern Carolina. Check your spelling. Makes it look like the whole article is contrived.
That is discriminatory and illegal. The researchers looked at lots of factors, including areas where targeting is acceptable practice. They wanted to know if Facebook was using their targeting algorithm where it should not be used. The answer seems to be that Facebook is breaking the law.
All the whining fools questioning the study are too stupid to read the summery and/or too dumb to understand it: typical Slashdot knuckle dragging idiots who still live in their parent's basement.
Why is Snark Required?
the ads have to work in the way the person paying for the ad wants.
Thats the service and that is their money to spend.
Why pay for and send out ads to people who will not want such ads?
Thats less ads for people who might be interested in the ads?
For that ability to really get the ads to a set of interest people filters, rules are needed.
Don't try and sell products to people who will not buy that brand, can't afford that brand, live in the wrong area to use that brand.
Say a smaller company has a few vans and a set range of service from a central location.
One person has a van and wants to sell a service to a range of people within set distances.
All kinds of different math goes into the reasons why service and product exists and will not exist all over a city, state, nation.
The other problem is what is a person doing to make an ad show?
Using social media/the internet to look up news, gossip, fun, games, cosmetics, cars, trucks, vans, holidays, banking services, a new home?
Only one ad can be displayed at a price point any one time so make sure that ad will get a persons interest and attention.
All data, past use, profile and what is ad is paying for is considered.
What will sell to that person in that hour, moment in time?
No past history due to blocking, a new account? Some ads can be set to display. Some ads want more user info before they can be placed.
Nobody wants to spend their ad budget balancing out average user counts to virtue signal.
They want every ad they pay for to get seen by a set of people they know might buy a product.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I use adblockers.
All us men are inundated with feminine hygiene ads. That will show ads are being non-discriminatory.
for saving us from the AI apocalypse with your endless bitching and hectoring about imaginary racism.
Lefty-speak for "Is discriminatory".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
To discriminate, by its primary definition, is simply to recognize differences or distinguish between things. By its secondary definition, discrimination refers to the unjust application of discrimination along categories like race, sex, or age. Facebook's trying to provide a platform that's attractive to marketers, and seems to be doing some optimizations of targeting "under the hood." Obviously, performance marketers are trying to optimize for number of clicks per placement, and if Facebook as a channel has better stats on this, they'll choose to invest more advertising dollar into Facebook. This is their entire business model. I see nothing wrong with this whatsoever. They're providing more value by connecting people with the right content, facilitating transactions. More so, they seem to be doing it by understanding who is interested in what sorts of products or services. The information they'd be leveraging to get at this is purely the outcome of aggregating an enormous amount of individual choices -- click, or don't click. This isn't unjust discrimination, it's just application of knowledge about who is most interested in what at the time, full stop. I think what people are starting to pick up on here, and why people are upset by this, is that advertising messaging gives people what they want, and tech-enabled message targeting can do that far more effectively than ever before. Tech has enabled targeted marketing to subsume a person's day-to-day experience of the outside world far more than in the past. This makes it an agent of unprecedented social control -- information exposure and availability is now administered, de facto, by a handful of large privately held corporations. I suppose I'm just suggesting that the motivations for the civil rights acts of half a century ago, and the narrative based around unjust discrimination based on protected classes, is simply not the right level of analysis. And Facebook isn't the enemy here, any more so than any one of the marketing channels competing with them for advertiser dollars. This is industry-wide, and it's an existential concern about the exercise of information delivery.
...people are losing their shit because they aren't being fed advertising to! If you had told me this 20 years ago, I would have immediately called the sheriff to have you committed.
This is the nature of buyers making free will choices. It's also the fact that men like things and women like people. So TFA presumes that differences are bad. Which I don't happen to agree with.
Hence the non-prejorative "discriminating " describes someone making decisions.
I'm a vendor and I want to buy advertising. Who are you to tell me what advertising I want to buy with my own money?
This is a fight over making sure consumers see certain kinds of ads, while consumers don't want to see any. That's ridiculous. Show me the person who is upset because they weren't bombarded with ads about improving their credit and I'll give their number to all the robocallers I hear from.
You are not entitled to interaction, including a business interaction, with anyone else any more than an arbitrary person is entitled to having sex with you. Laws to the contrary do exist; we do live with them and also call them bullshit which they are.
There are people that actually click on ads?
This explains so much of what is wrong with the world wide web today.
The unwashed masses and souless social media (aka ad companies) have ruined what was once a wonderful thing.
Now get off my lawn!
Isnt discrimination the main factor in targeted ads? Seriously how else do you target the people most likely to buy your shit? I thought that was the point..
At some point everyone will be discriminated against, even if by accident, so it doesn't matter. Unless someone at Facebook is intentionally routing traffic or ads so it's exclusionary as a form of hate, then it doesn't matter.
Targeted advertising doesn't really bother me. I mean... it would sure be *nice* if we could get along without ads in general. And, on the internet, I use a blocker to get rid of the more obnoxious ones which actively interfere with my ability to get to content, or which drive up my CPU usage or pose a security risk. But I get that internet infrastructure has to be paid for; and that, when you're not paying a subscription fee (And paying for a subscription damn well BETTER come with a 100% ad-free experience.), someone ELSE is paying for the service. And the only real way that happens is if that someone is advertising to me.
So, I figure if I have to see ads anyway, why SHOULDN'T they be targeted at me so they'll actually be relevant? In fact, considering the data that Google and Facebook already have on me, they damn well BETTER be relevant. Thus, it's not targeted ads that really bother me. But POORLY targeted ads trigger an irrational level of rage. I can't fathom ever wanting to buy a house in somewhere boring and suburban like Marin or Contra Costa counties; or taking a job as a cop or security guard. You can call Miller low-life "the champagne of beers", but as far as I'm concerned, that swill should be poured back into the horse it came from. You can wrap micro-transaction shovelware in a Star Trek or Game of Thrones skin and call it an iOS "game"; but it's still trash I'll never pay in to. And Google and Facebook sure as hell have enough data that they should know this. So, dammit, not a single whit of my time, attention, bandwidth or CPU capacity should be wasted with ads for any of the same. Creditkarma.com knows my FICO score, so I shouldn't have to see ads there for credit repair tools for people fresh out of bankruptcy or student loan default. (And hell... if Google and Facebook *DON'T* know my actual FICO, they should sure as hell be able to make a pretty good guess.) And no, it's not Orwellian, you tools. Corporations don't want us to embrace Insoc, hate Eurasia (or is is Eastasia?) or to love Big Brother. They just want our money.
Sure, people can be assholes. So maybe... MAYBE... there are some categories should not be allowed to be manually targeted for some categories of product. But if it's an automated and algorithmically targeted advertisement? If a computer (Which, not being human, is inherently NOT racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, or whatever.) is making the call without human intervention? I'm kind of on Facebook's side on this one.
Imagine all the people...
Its almost like there are real differences between genders and race....
They are fucking ads! Please, please discriminate against me by not bombarding with shot.
Advertising is not part of the human condition for fucks sake. Wake up steeple. Yure doing the consume, breed, obey stuff from "They Live" voluntarily, no subliminal required. Seriously WTF!
I noticed that I get different ads on my phone based on geo-location. If I'm in a 'white neighborhood', I tend to get the white version of some commercials. (Like the robo caller commercial, for example.) When I'm in a black neighborhood, the ad is the black version. When I'm in a hispanic neighborhood, I actually get Spanish ads. (I don't even speak Spanish primarily, and have my preferences set to English.)
I drive for a living, so I'm all over the place (My company covers 9 states and a lot of socio-economic regions), and I think that they use the location information to target people of that region with different ad versions. It's not only creepy, but it's also really fucked up.