Facebook's Ad Delivery Reportedly Excluded Audience along Racial and Gender Lines

April 3, 2019

Facebook's housing and employment ad delivery reportedly resulted in skewed exposure towards some users based on demographic factors like gender and racial identity, highlighting the importance of safe and secure AI practices. This incident underscores the need for governance, especially within Project Cerebellum's AI incident database, to prevent such harmful practices. For those interested in shaping the future of trustworthy AI and contributing to HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern), JOIN US.

Learn how this incident maps to HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM: Govern.

Matched TAIM controls

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

GOVERN 3.1 — similarity 0.696, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.692, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 1.1 — similarity 0.686, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: facebook
Alleged developer: facebook
Alleged harmed parties: female-facebook-users, black-facebook-users, male-facebook-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/161

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.