• Audio
  • Live tv
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
Friday, September 29, 2023
Morning News
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • Home
  • News
    • Local
    • National
    • World
  • Markets
  • Economy
  • Crypto
  • Real Estate
  • Sports
  • Entertainment
  • Health
  • Tech
    • Automotive
    • Business
    • Computer Sciences
    • Consumer & Gadgets
    • Electronics & Semiconductors
    • Energy & Green Tech
    • Engineering
    • Hi Tech & Innovation
    • Machine learning & AI
    • Security
    • Hardware
    • Internet
    • Robotics
    • Software
    • Telecom
  • Lifestyle
    • Fashion
    • Travel
    • Canadian immigration
  • App
    • audio
    • live tv
  • Home
  • News
    • Local
    • National
    • World
  • Markets
  • Economy
  • Crypto
  • Real Estate
  • Sports
  • Entertainment
  • Health
  • Tech
    • Automotive
    • Business
    • Computer Sciences
    • Consumer & Gadgets
    • Electronics & Semiconductors
    • Energy & Green Tech
    • Engineering
    • Hi Tech & Innovation
    • Machine learning & AI
    • Security
    • Hardware
    • Internet
    • Robotics
    • Software
    • Telecom
  • Lifestyle
    • Fashion
    • Travel
    • Canadian immigration
  • App
    • audio
    • live tv
No Result
View All Result
Morning News
No Result
View All Result
Home Tech Business

Facebook’s ad delivery algorithm is discriminating based on race, gender and age in photos, researchers find

author by author
October 25, 2022
in Business, Internet
Reading Time: 4 mins read
0 0
A A
0
0
SHARES
10
VIEWS
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterLinkedinReddit
Facebook's ad delivery algorithm is discriminating based on race, gender and age in photos, researchers find
Credit: Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University

Have you ever noticed the faces in Facebook ads seem to match your gender, race or age? That isn’t an accident, Northeastern computer science researchers say.

A new paper published by a group of researchers from Northeastern’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences found that Facebook’s algorithm delivers advertisements differently based on who is pictured in the ad.

“When you choose to include a picture of a Black person, that will significantly make it more likely the ad will be delivered to Black users,” says Alan Mislove, professor and senior associate dean for academic affairs in Khoury and one of the authors of the research. “When you choose to include a picture of a woman versus a man, in general it will go more to women, except images of young women, which go more to older men.”

Discriminatory advertising is well-documented on Facebook. In June, the U.S. Department of Justice secured a settlement agreement after charging Meta with algorithmic bias for its housing advertisement delivery system. The paper itself is part of a broader focus on algorithmic auditing and ad delivery for Mislove, who co-authored the paper with Khoury associate research scientist Piotr Sapiezynski, Ph.D. candidate Levi Kaplan and third-year cybersecurity student Nicole Gerzon.

The researchers’ previous work showed how problematic Facebook’s ad delivery system was, skewing ad delivery along largely demographic lines. Job ads in the lumber industry are delivered disproportionately to white men, while jobs for janitorial positions go disproportionately to Black women, according to Mislove.

Mislove says this often happens independent of what advertisers have told Facebook’s ad delivery system. The way it works is advertisers upload their ad to Facebook and then specify their targeted audience, such as 18- to 35-year-olds in Boston.

“That’s a big population,” Mislove says. “Your ad very likely will not be shown to them all. The algorithm is going to decide, in some sense, which subset sees them, and it does that by making an estimate of relevance, meaning which users are most likely to engage with this.”

But how is the algorithm learning to discriminate? Like any algorithm, Facebook’s ad delivery system is trained using data. In this case, that includes all the data Meta has collected on all the previous ads that have run on Facebook and who has clicked on those ads. This latest research shows that the image included in the ad is what Facebook’s algorithm responds most strongly to.

“The algorithm is going to figure out, “What can I use that is most likely to cause somebody to click?'” Mislove says. “In this case, race and gender are predictive of whether somebody’s going to click, so it uses that just because that’s exactly what it’s designed to do.”

The algorithm doesn’t know or care about race, gender and age, but it still uses those features to make “very crude” estimations about where to send housing or job ads, Sapiezynski says.

“Probably Facebook might say they don’t try to do race classification from pictures, but the results that we’re presenting show, at some level, it is happening because the algorithm does not recognize that this is just an ad of a person but it is a particular kind of person that Black people are more likely to engage with,” Sapiezynski says. “So, effectively, it is doing race classification on pictures of people.”

In some cases, this might be exactly what an advertiser is looking for. If they want to attract more women or people of color, they will likely use images with women and people of color and the algorithm will pick up on that when it delivers the ad. In other cases, it can be extremely problematic. In what Mislove called the Creepy Old Man Effect, ads featuring young women were delivered disproportionately to older men.

Part of the challenge is that there is very little transparency when it comes to how this system works. Mislove, Sapiezynski and their team spent tens of thousands of dollars and countless hours setting up the ad campaigns they used to figure out how this system functions. But the average advertiser doesn’t necessarily have the time or resources to do that.

There are also broader policy questions about how existing civil rights protections play into algorithms and artificial intelligence. The Fair Housing Act, Equal Credit Opportunity Act and Age Discrimination in Employment Act all include regulations around traditional advertising––but not ads on social media.

“We need to make it more clear when this is happening, to whom it’s happening and then give advertisers control to say, “Maybe I don’t want this ad delivery algorithm doing this on an opportunity ad where it potentially could be illegal because of civil rights protections,'” Mislove says.

Between the Justice Department’s recent lawsuit against Meta and the White House’s blueprint for an AI bill of rights, the debate around the real-world implications of these systems is heating up. Social media companies are pushing for self-regulation, but Mislove says there is no guarantee that would address the problem.

“I think they have a poor track record of self-regulating,” Mislove says. “In many cases, they don’t want to engage on these issues because it goes at the core of their business model. … You’d certainly need regulation and laws to address what you can do, but it’s not clear what’s the best way to do that yet.”

The research was published as part of the Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Internet Measurement Conference.


Explore further

Facebook’s ad delivery system still discriminates by race, gender, age


More information:
Levi Kaplan et al, Measurement and analysis of implied identity in ad delivery optimization, Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Internet Measurement Conference (2022). DOI: 10.1145/3517745.3561450

Provided by
Northeastern University

Citation:
Facebook’s ad delivery algorithm is discriminating based on race, gender and age in photos, researchers find (2022, October 25)
retrieved 25 October 2022
from https://techxplore.com/news/2022-10-facebook-ad-delivery-algorithm-discriminating.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
Tags: algorithmself-regulationsettlement agreementsocial media
Previous Post

Nicki Minaj Celebrates Son Papa Bear’s 2nd Birthday With Over-The-Top ‘Minions’ Party

Next Post

Ralph Fiennes Says ‘Verbal Abuse’ Against J.K. Rowling Is ‘Disgusting’ And ‘Appalling’

Related Posts

Business

EasyJet CEO ‘confident’ after last summer’s travel chaos

September 29, 2023
12
Internet

AI-generated spam may soon be flooding your inbox—and it will be personalized to be especially persuasive

September 29, 2023
11
Next Post
Ralph Fiennes

Ralph Fiennes Says ‘Verbal Abuse’ Against J.K. Rowling Is ‘Disgusting’ And ‘Appalling’

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

POPULAR TODAY

Economy

Why have frozen fruit and vegetable prices soared by almost 12% — but the cost of fresh produce has not?

by author
September 28, 2023
0
30

What’s going on with frozen fruit and vegetables?Food prices rose 0.2% on the month in July after remaining unchanged in...

A woman waits for a healthcare worker in a physician's office.

Stem Cell Therapy May Help Treat Multiple Sclerosis

September 29, 2023
16

Wildfire battles continue as heat, air quality alerts affect most of Canada

July 9, 2023
595

U.S. stocks end higher after Fed Chair Powell’s Jackson Hole remarks, S&P 500 snaps 3-week losing streak

September 28, 2023
15
cease-fire in Khartoum, Sudan

Sudan’s military says it has suspended its participation in talks with paramilitary rival

September 28, 2023
15

POPULAR NEWS

This chart went viral in response to news that credit-card debt hit $1 trillion

September 22, 2023
39
Jimmy Buffett

What to Know About Merkel Cell Carcinoma, the Cause of Jimmy Buffet’s Death

September 9, 2023
27
A person holding the drug Mounjaro.

Mounjaro Superior to Ozempic for Blood Sugar and Weight Loss, Study Finds

September 26, 2023
18
Sharon Osbourne

Sharon Osbourne Stopped Taking Ozempic Because She Lost Too Much Weight

September 28, 2023
17
A nurse puts a blood pressure cuff on a woman.

High Blood Pressure at 18 Puts You at Higher Risk for Heart Attack at Midlife

September 26, 2023
17

EDITOR'S PICK

Toni Garrn and Alex Pettyfer
Entertainment

Toni Garrn Announces Divorce From Alex Pettyfer After 2 Years Of Marriage

by author
September 1, 2023
0
13

Calling it quits! Alex Pettyfer and Toni Garrn are divorcing after more than two years of marriage.Garrn shared the news in a...

Read more

Why is hazing such a widespread problem? Abuse prevalent despite efforts to stop it

David Arquette Admits Feeling Inferior To Ex-Wife Courteney Cox During Her ‘Friends’ Fame

TTC fares are increasing today. Here’s what you need to know

BlackRock insiders say Bitcoin ETF is likely 6 months away: Novogratz

Morning News

Welcome to our Ads

Create ads focused on the objectives most important to your business Please contact us info@morns.ca

End Homelessness.

you can give to funds under our care to End Homelessness and to support a cause, a current event, a remembrance for a fundraising initiative.

Please Support Us

Recent Comments

    Most Comments

    Economy

    .Biden targets ‘surprise fees’ from airlines: ‘You should know the full cost of your ticket right when you’re comparison shopping’.

    September 27, 2022
    13
    Economy

    .Fed’s Mester says inflation is going to remain hard to predict.

    September 27, 2022
    11
    Economy

    .Congress faces Friday deadline for averting government shutdown, as senators grapple with Manchin’s permitting plan.

    September 27, 2022
    14
    Economy

    .Biden’s plan to cancel student loans will cost $400 billion, CBO estimates.

    September 27, 2022
    11
    Economy

    .Michigan Democratic lawmaker’s staff has become first U.S. congressional office to form union.

    September 27, 2022
    12
    Load More
    • Home
    • Audio
    • Live tv
    • About Us
    • Contact Us
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Service

    © 2022 Morning News - morns.ca by morns.ca.

    No Result
    View All Result
    • Home
    • News
      • Local
      • National
      • World
    • Markets
    • Economy
    • Crypto
    • Real Estate
    • Sports
    • Entertainment
    • Health
    • Tech
      • Automotive
      • Business
      • Computer Sciences
      • Consumer & Gadgets
      • Electronics & Semiconductors
      • Energy & Green Tech
      • Engineering
      • Hi Tech & Innovation
      • Machine learning & AI
      • Security
      • Hardware
      • Internet
      • Robotics
      • Software
      • Telecom
    • Lifestyle
      • Fashion
      • Travel
      • Canadian immigration
    • App
      • audio
      • live tv
    • Login

    © 2022 Morning News - morns.ca by morns.ca.

    Welcome Back!

    Sign In with Facebook
    Sign In with Google
    Sign In with Linked In
    OR

    Login to your account below

    Forgotten Password?

    Retrieve your password

    Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

    Log In