Does Facebook still sell discriminatory ads?
We found discriminatory ads can still appear, despite Facebook’s efforts
Facebook’s algorithm has its own biases
Once an advertiser picks its target audience, Facebook’s algorithm makes its own decisions about which specific user within the target audience to show an ad to.
The goal of that algorithm, Facebook hassaid, is to try to predict which people might be interested in the ad, based on their Facebook activity and the demographics it can pull from their personal pages—including age, gender, and other factors.
“Facebook is not giving the user what the user wants—Facebook is giving the user what it thinks a demographic stereotype wants,”wrotethe Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in a court filing.
In 2019, researchers at Northeastern University and the digital civil rights advocacy group Upturn ran dozens of their own ads, all targeted to the same broad audience, andfoundthat Facebook showed the ads seeking to hire secretaries mostly to women.
It’s not clear whether Facebook programmed its algorithms to show the secretary job ad to anygivenwoman because she herself did something to express an interest in secretarial work, or simply because she was a woman.
A team at Carnegie Mellon University recentlyanalyzedreal-life ads for things like jobs, housing, and credit that were included (sometimes by mistake) in Facebook’s publicly available archive of political ads. The ads were posted both before and after Facebook’s policy change.
“For pretty much all the types of credit ads that we’ve analyzed,” said Sara Kingsley, a Ph.D. student who led that research, “men tend to be a greater percentage” of the people shown the ad.
Housing and job ads, she said, went disproportionately to women. But individual ads can vary widely:
Things that Facebook may consider innocuous data points may correlate so strongly with age or gender or race that “the algorithm sees thecircumstancesof older black women, which are the result of systemic discrimination and inequity, and misinterprets those circumstances aspreferences,” David Brody, an attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said in an email.
“So the next time the algorithm encounters a user matching the qualities of an older black woman, it is going to impute those so-called preferences on to that user and in the process reinforce the pattern of systemic discrimination,” he said.
What has Facebook done about it?
Facebook’s 2019 settlement with civil rights groups required it to implement new rules, like requiring advertisers to click a button to self-report housing, job, and credit ads. Facebook then removes certain demographic targeting choices from that ad’s menu of options.
And Facebook began requiring advertisers to accept anagreementpromising not to discriminate. The company also promised to research bias in its algorithms. But researchers and civil rights activists say that they’re frustrated the company hasn’t released any findings.
One internal studyreportedlyfound bias against users who had been categorized as matching the African American “multicultural affinity” category. Facebook made adjustments but shut down further research because that category was not supposed to represent race—data that Facebook didn’t gather from its users.
“They have chosen not to collect that data because they don’t want to turn on the lights and see how many cockroaches are in the room,” Brody said.
Just a few weeks ago, Facebook created teams to study racial bias on its platforms.
Wait, isn’t discrimination illegal?
California law bans “intentional” discrimination in places of “public accommodation,” including on websites. A pendinglawsuitin federal court in Northern California argues that Facebook’s ads break that law because the algorithms’ outcomes treat people differently based on characteristics like age and gender.
“Look, they wrote the algorithm,” Brody told The Markup. “No one knows how the algorithm works except them. They are responsible for everything the algorithm does.” (Facebook declined to comment on the lawsuit, but in court filings, it has denied breaking the law.)
Federal laws also ban discrimination, but federal law also protects tech companies like Facebook from liability over the content on their platforms—specificallySection 230(c) of the Communications Decency Act, which in essence says websites aren’t responsible for things other people say on their sites.
Facebook’slegal responseto the public accommodation lawsuit in California invokes Section 230—essentially saying the company can’t be sued over ads on its platform—a legal question that has not yet been settled.
Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat, in a statement sent to The Markup, called Facebook’s argument in fighting the public accommodation lawsuit a “misuse of Section 230.” It’s “one of the most pressing examples of why we need to reform this antiquated law,” he said. “Internet exceptionalism rationales should not stand in the way of upholding longstanding principles of fairness and non-discrimination.”
This article wasoriginally published on The Markupby Jeremy B. Merrill and was republished under theCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeslicense.
