Facebook’s Advertisement Moderation System Routinely Misidentified Adaptive Fashion Products as Medical Equipment and Blocked Their Sellers

February 11, 2021

Facebook's automated ad moderation system has been found to misclassify adaptive fashion products as medical and healthcare equipment, leading to regular bans and appeals for retailers.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.733, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.721, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.719, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: facebook, instagram
Alleged developer: facebook, instagram
Alleged harmed parties: facebook-users-of-disabilities, adaptive-fashion-retailers

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/142

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.