Facebook’s Algorithm Mistook an Advertisement of Onions as Sexual Suggestive Content

October 3, 2020

Facebook's content moderation AI mistakenly identified and removed a Canadian business's onion advertisement as overtly sexual content. Upon review, the post was reinstated. The incident highlights the importance of responsible AI governance and safe and secure AI practices.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.668, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MANAGE 4.3 — similarity 0.661, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.659, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: facebook
Alleged developer: facebook
Alleged harmed parties: the-seed-company-by-e.w.-gaze, businesses-on-facebook

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/282

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

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