Facebook Recommended Military Gear Ads Despite Pause on Weapons Accessories Ads

January 13, 2021

The algorithmic recommendations of Facebook reportedly continued showing advertisements for military gear, despite the platform halting weapons accessories ads following the US Capitol attack. This incident highlights the need for trustworthy AI and safe and secure AI practices in governance. JOIN US at HISPI Project Cerebellum to map such incidents and implement guardrails for AI to prevent harm.

For those interested, learn how this incident maps to the Govern function of HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.654, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.638, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MANAGE 4.1 — similarity 0.634, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: facebook
Alleged developer: facebook
Alleged harmed parties: facebook-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/318

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.